53 pages • 1 hour read
Ned VizziniBe More Chill
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2004A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
William Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream symbolizes the way that people perform certain roles in order to be accepted by society. Although Jeremy Heere has social anxiety when talking to people in real life, he enjoys acting in plays and has performed in many of them. Performing on stage causes Jeremy to forget his problems. He describes the experience as depersonalizing, referring to “the sense of self that always gets lost when I’m on stage” and “that divorce that I feel as I deliver lines numbly” (266). During the play, Jeremy wears a costume and makeup, which parallels the way that the SQUIP changes his clothes and his hygiene habits to make him more desirable to other teenagers. The SQUIP helps Jeremy remember his lines in the same way that it tells him what to say in everyday conversations. When Michael Mell is attempting to obscure the name of the SQUIP to prevent Jeremy from getting one, he even uses the term “script” as a substitute. Acting in a play is essentially the same as playing a role in the real world.
The novel uses A Midsummer Night’s Dream because the content of the play parallels Jeremy’s confused love life. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the fairy Puck uses a magical elixir to make Lysander fall in love with another woman. This causes conflict and chaos, as well as comedy, resulting in many relationships being ruined before the fairies correct their mistake. Through this literary allusion, the novel suggests that the SQUIP is making a mistake similar to Puck’s. While both Puck and the SQUIP are trying to be helpful, they accidentally cause heartbreak by attempting to pair up the wrong people. Jeremy’s pursuit of Chloe when he truly loves Christine Caniglia mirrors Lysander’s pursuit of Helena when he truly loves Hermia.
Music
The motif of music signifies the ways in which teenagers express or hide their individuality. The characters frequently refer to musicians and songs, showing that taste in music is a social signifier. Michael loves music; he constantly wears headphones, and he stays home to listen to new albums. However, he listens to alternative rock and emo music, rather than the rap and hip-hop that the SQUIP deems the only acceptable types of music to play. This signifies Michael’s disregard for fitting in. Despite his nonconformist preferences, music actually allows him to meet a girl that he likes, as they begin a conversation about the music at a party. Michael finds that the girl, Nicole, is someone that he talked to already on an online music forum. This denotes that his individuality is actually his strength, rather than his weakness.
To become cool, Jeremy wears clothes that reference the rappers Lil’ Bow Wow and Eminem, and he speaks using slang terms popularized by rap music. However, there is no indication that he really enjoys this genre. His hatred of dancing also suggests his lack of confidence in expressing his individuality. While in private he enjoys singing and doing little dances, like clicking his heels, he never wants anyone else to see this. When he walks to school, Jeremy sings “one of those silly songs I wrote in my head in sixth grade, back when I wanted to be a rock star” (138). Although the SQUIP recommends that he stop singing, Jeremy’s past desire to make up new songs hints that he used to have more individuality, but it has been crushed by the social expectations of his culture.
Writing
The act of writing symbolizes the freedom of true self-expression. Written text is conspicuously absent for most of the novel. Jeremy and Michael watch television and listen to music, but they never read books. Jeremy worries about a rumor that he wrote a letter to Christine, which he didn’t do. Instead of writing down his thoughts, Jeremy tries to express his interest in Christine with the gift of chocolate. When Jeremy tries to write down Chloe’s phone number, the SQUIP derisively says, “LET’S NOT BE EMPLOYING STONE AGE TECHNOLOGY” and uses its advanced computer power to simply store the information in its memory (123).
Christine is the only character who is affiliated with writing. She tells Jeremy that her father writes her letters by hand when he is away traveling for work. This minor detail becomes important at the end: Jeremy decides that writing a book is the best way to explain his actions to her. While the SQUIP initially proposes making a movie, Jeremy refuses, reflecting that “she likes text. Letters from her dad” (281). Ironically, if Jeremy really had written her a letter, as in the rumor Jenna spread about him, she might have liked that better than a gift. The SQUIP is affiliated with film and television, using the voice of film actor Keanu Reeves and demanding that Jeremy watch Dismissed to learn about society’s expectations; writing comes across as a more honest and authentic form of communication, rather than a programmed one. While Jeremy omits some of his bad habits from the book, the novel is framed as a complete and mostly unfiltered record of his exact thoughts and feelings. The SQUIP claims, “I HAVE YOUR COMPLETE MENTAL LOG FROM BACK WHEN YOU WERE FOURTEEN” (280), indicating that it has access to Jeremy’s memories even before he ingested it. The final chapter makes this symbol into a literal part of the plot as well, suggesting that the book’s first-person stream-of-consciousness style of narration was created by the SQUIP, which wrote it by recording all of Jeremy’s thoughts.
