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Chapter 36: Darrell
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Power, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Power and Violence
Corruption
Gender Reversals and Sexism
Stories, History, and Perspective
Religion and Manipulation
Revolution and Social Change
Summary
Analysis
Roxy tells Tunde that she can get him out of the country. Roxy also says that she plans to get her skein back, and then she’ll find him. Roxy makes a phone call at a payphone and then tells Tunde that a blonde woman will pick him up that evening at a provided location and drive him across the border in the car’s trunk. He understands why he can’t go with her: if she is seen to be taking care of a man, he can be used against her. They part ways with one final kiss.
Alongside the more explicit gender reversals in the book, there are also some subtler references to these reversed dynamics, particularly with the knowledge that this is a book within a book. Tunde and Roxy’s goodbye echoes that of traditional heroic endings, with the man rescuing the woman and the belief that she is essentially a weakness of his. This time, the genders are reversed, and the moment seems like it might even be a way for Neil to appeal to his own society’s gender norms.
Themes
Tunde finds the place Roxy described. He waits for ten minutes, the dread building up in him. He has a package with the rest of his footage and notebooks, and he starts to worry that they might never get seen if he ends up dying before he can make it out of the country. He writes a name and address on the package, and puts it in a post box that he hopes still works.
Tunde understands that the power of being able to tell a story can extend even beyond his life, which is why he chooses to send his materials out rather than keeping them safe with him. Additionally, in choosing to send them to UrbanDox (as is soon revealed), he hopes to guarantee that they will be published maintaining his perspective as a man, and not used or omitted by the news to maintain the power of women.
Themes
The car arrives with a blonde woman behind the wheel. She helps Tunde into the trunk of the car and gives him a bottle of water for the eight-hour journey. She tells him to trust her.
This is the last time that readers actually see Tunde, and his fate remains ambiguous. In a way, it almost becomes irrelevant given the event of the Cataclysm, which reinforces how control over writing history goes hand in hand with power more generally. Even if Tunde had survived, it is unlikely that his memory or his work would have been upheld following the Cataclysm, as Neil writes at the end of the book.
Themes
