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Jeph is a 14-year-old boy, and the only surviving child in a rural community dedicated to natural healing. When the narrator first enters Jeph’s community, Jeph is newly orphaned, having lost his parents in quick succession. As the one young person in the community (and as someone presumably, though never openly, in grief), Jeph is allowed to behave badly; the narrator is often the target of his cruel, crude comments. In an ultimately successful attempt to get the narrator to drive him to the city, Jeph runs an assay on the narrator, leveraging the narrator’s privileged medical knowledge for his own purposes. Jeph’s combination of teenaged arrogance and excitement to see the world reflects that 14-year-olds, too, still experience youth and adolescence under apocalyptic circumstances—as the narrator puts it, Jeph “is, after all, a growing boy.”
Jeph Quotes in Things We Didn’t See Coming
The Things We Didn’t See Coming quotes below are all either spoken by Jeph or refer to Jeph. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Predisposed
Quotes
It's not that long a hike, they're not that heavy, my system is fine. I load all the bundles onto my back and head us through the woods, to our community. He's following me at a petulant distance behind me, carrying nothing. I refuse to wait for him now and I'm marching through the forest, winding along the widest paths I can find. I hope he's thinking how wrong he is about my bones, but the fact is he's probably thinking about what extra food he can scam away from some of the other elders at mealtime. He is, after all, a growing boy.
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
The elders will force him to reveal all. Naturally, their concern for the community will be limited to my ability to perform my tasks and nothing will really slow me down, except maybe the cancer. As for me, they’ll let me go for treatment when it's convenient. For now, I'm more useful here, with all these ticking bombs inside me. And my incipient erectile dysfunction will be a welcome relief for the few of the unions I've meddled in. What if everyone's assays were run? Would that change minds? There'd be a great rush for the road, everyone aching to repair shoulders and glands. That, I suppose, is why they don't allow it.
I'd really wanted to call this place home.
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Jeph Quotes in Things We Didn’t See Coming
The Things We Didn’t See Coming quotes below are all either spoken by Jeph or refer to Jeph. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Predisposed
Quotes
It's not that long a hike, they're not that heavy, my system is fine. I load all the bundles onto my back and head us through the woods, to our community. He's following me at a petulant distance behind me, carrying nothing. I refuse to wait for him now and I'm marching through the forest, winding along the widest paths I can find. I hope he's thinking how wrong he is about my bones, but the fact is he's probably thinking about what extra food he can scam away from some of the other elders at mealtime. He is, after all, a growing boy.
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
The elders will force him to reveal all. Naturally, their concern for the community will be limited to my ability to perform my tasks and nothing will really slow me down, except maybe the cancer. As for me, they’ll let me go for treatment when it's convenient. For now, I'm more useful here, with all these ticking bombs inside me. And my incipient erectile dysfunction will be a welcome relief for the few of the unions I've meddled in. What if everyone's assays were run? Would that change minds? There'd be a great rush for the road, everyone aching to repair shoulders and glands. That, I suppose, is why they don't allow it.
I'd really wanted to call this place home.
