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Chapter 37
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
Jocelyn is taking pictures when Darrell appears next to her. She tries to pretend she’s a tourist, but she’s in army fatigues. She explains, then, that she’s off duty. Darrell reaches out his hand to offer to help her and then kills her radio with a jolt. Jocelyn realizes that he has a skein.
Darrell’s having gained a skein only reinforces Eve’s point that there will always be men who want to take the power away from women; when Eve sees Roxy in a subsequent chapter she explicitly uses Darrell as a reason to pursue the rebuilding and restructuring of society.
Themes
Darrell and Jocelyn start to circle each other as they prepare to fight. Darrell realizes that Roxy’s skein has loads of power left. Jocelyn, too, has more power than she’s ever had, thanks to Eve’s cure. Jocelyn maneuvers defensively, avoiding his blasts. She collapses, feigning that she’s hurt, so that he crouches to attack her. She quickly rolls out from under him and kicks him in the side of the head. But when she reaches out to jolt him, she cannot find her power.
The consequences of Eve’s manipulation bear out here, when the cure stops working and Jocelyn can no longer find her power. Alderman makes clear that this kind of deception, and the unending faith in Eve and the Holy Mother that it gave Jocelyn, can have deadly consequences.
Themes
Darrell kicks Jocelyn in the jaw with his heel. He kicks her over and over, then pushes her head down and gives her a charge to the base of her skull. She sinks to ground. He waits until she’s stopped twitching. He looks up at the women in the window, smiling.
Darrell has no need or reason to hurt Jocelyn so severely, and in fact it becomes clear that doing so has put him in danger. But just like the other characters who acquire the power, he does it because having that power prompts him to use it and expand it, and he is corrupted by its influence.
Themes
The women inside the factory are not glad to see what Darrell has done. They stare at him, then march toward him together. Darrell starts to run: he knows they know what he’s done. But Jocelyn has injured one of his legs, and the women catch up to him easily. He begs them not to hurt him, apologizing for what he’s done. They rip him limb from limb, shocking him and burning him. They pull the skein from his chest just before they tear his head off.
Through this gruesome scene, Alderman reinforces the difficulty of giving up power once one has achieved it. Not only is the loss of power what prompted Darrell to take Roxy’s skein in the first place, but it also motivates the women here. Knowing what Darrell has done, they understand that they cannot let him live because he might inspire other men to try to take skeins from other women.
Themes
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