Addiction Theme Analysis

In the Methuen orphanage, the protagonist Beth and her peers are given tranquilizers to calm them. Beth quickly becomes reliant on the tranquilizers to ease her anxiety, beginning a life-long addiction to the pills. Beth’s adopted mother, Mrs. Wheatley, also faces addiction—which causes her death—and she unintentionally enables Beth’s addiction to alcohol as well. At first, Beth thinks that drugs and alcohol help her play chess, allowing her to calm her nerves and help her sleep the night before big matches. But gradually, her addiction jeopardizes her chess career, her friendships, and even her life, until she is able to overcome it with the help of her friend Jolene. While Beth’s addiction is devastating, the book portrays it sympathetically, acknowledging that it isn’t her fault and that, for her, it is a biological imperative to cope with stress and grief rather than a moral failing.

The book makes clear that Beth’s addiction is not her fault, but that it is enabled by the orphanage, by Mrs. Wheatley, and perhaps even her genetics. Beth initially becomes addicted to tranquilizers when the school distributes them to the children daily. Over time, she becomes addicted to them, and when the school stops distributing them because of new laws, Beth experiences severe withdrawal and tries to steal the pills. When she is caught and punished for this, she is “aware of the complicity of the orphanage that had fed her and all the others on pills.” She tells the staff that they shouldn’t have given her the pills in the first place. This makes it clear that Beth is just a child who could not help how she reacted to the pills—the real responsibility for her addiction lies with those who gave her drugs. This is true of Beth’s alcohol addiction as well. Beth doesn’t drink until she’s 16, when Mrs. Wheatley offers her a beer. Beth drinks it quickly and retrieves another. Mrs. Wheatley is at first hesitant to see Beth drink a second so quickly, but then simply says, “if you’re going to do that, let me have one too.” In this way, Mrs. Wheatley not only enables Beth’s drinking at a young age, but also encourages it. The book also suggests that Beth’s addiction might stem from her genetics as well, as it implies that Beth’s father was rarely sober. Beth’s biological mother told her that he died of a “carefree life,” a euphemism that seems to imply he was an alcoholic, and so Beth was more susceptible to addiction for this reason—not because of any moral failing.

As Beth turns more and more to pills and alcohol, the book illustrates how she uses these substances to cope with the extensive stress and grief in her life. Even from Beth’s first time trying tranquilizers, she relies on them because they “[loosen] something deep in her stomach and [help] her doze away the tense hours in the orphanage.” Later, she often takes tranquilizers the night before big chess matches, because she has become so reliant on them that it’s almost impossible for her to sleep without them. In this way, the book demonstrates how Beth’s habit has turned into a fully-blown addiction: the pills have altered her body in a way that she cannot control because she so desperately needs to cope with the stress in her life. Beth often uses after periods of intense grief, like after Mrs. Wheatley’s death in Mexico City—which the book implies may have been caused by Mrs. Wheatley’s own alcohol addiction, as she dies of hepatitis (a liver condition). Beth then travels around the city, buying hundreds of pills from various pharmacies. A half hour before the funeral, Beth takes four of them, and she continues to self-medicate in the subsequent days and weeks. While Beth takes the desire to calm down to an extreme, the book allows readers to sympathize with Beth and recognize her vulnerability and need in these moments.

The book also portrays addiction as a deadly and difficult disease—one that almost kills Beth and ruins her career—rather than a conscious choice Beth irresponsibly makes . After Beth suffers a devastating loss in Paris against Vasily Borgov, she returns to Kentucky and drinks for weeks on end—almost becoming so weak that she can’t sit up in bed from getting drunk and not eating enough. Still, even when she finally manages to sit up, she finishes a drink on her nightstand. This illogical behavior demonstrates how out of control Beth is—it is truly an illness that she cannot help, and which is killing her. Even when Beth tries to return to chess, she discovers that her mind is too foggy, and she is terrified that she has somehow damaged her talent with her drinking. After losing to a far inferior player, she opens another bottle of white wine at home and starts to drink, even though “A voice inside her [cries] out at the outrage.” She knows that continuing to drink will only hurt her body and mind further, and yet this is the crux of addiction’s devastation because it has a hold on Beth’s body while ignoring and damaging her mind. Through the course of Beth’s entire addiction, then, the book illustrates how it isn’t Beth’s fault, but is instead a physical illness and compulsion.

Beth’s recovery from her addiction reinforces again how it is a disease—she cannot simply choose to overcome it; she can only find ways to cope with it. She needs help from her friends, particularly Jolene, who gives her a diet and exercise regimen. Beth also rids her hotel rooms and house of alcohol to prevent temptation in the first place. Thus, the book sympathizes with Beth’s addiction as a deadly disease that she cannot cure herself of, but that she can find strategies to mitigate.