Holding Up The Universe

In spite of his own missteps, Jack has grown significantly as a person. Readers see this when Jack is alone in the bedroom with Caroline. He quizzes her on her secrets, asking, “What’s one thing people don’t know about you?” (460). Her answers are run-of-the-mill, and Jack realizes, “All this time, I thought she was a security blanket, but there’s no security here. How can there be when she doesn’t see me any more than I see her?” (460). This revelation is important to Jack’s characterization for a couple of reasons: first, that he is bored by her minor, unimpressive secrets suggests that he is beginning to appreciate imperfection. Jack wants a companion with real flaws and secrets, someone who is not afraid to share herimperfection—someone like Libby. Beyond that, Jack is finally able to tear himself away from Caroline because he realizes that she cannot “see” him. He is beginning to realize that “seeing” a person is more than just observing their physical attributes, even if they are beautiful by conventional standards. Caroline sees Jack as an attractive, confident, outgoing jock, but nothing more. Ironically, that is what causes him to lose his attraction for her, since he would prefer to be seen as the imperfect human that he is. At this point in the novel, only Libby can see Jack in that way.

On the ride home from the party, Jack and Libby talk about Herschel Walker, a famous football player with dissociative identity disorder who compared the disorder to wearing different hats. Jack explains, “You know how we wear hats for all different situations? One for family. One for school. One for work. But with DID, it’s like the hats get mixed up” (489). Jack determines that he and Libby probably have more in common with Herschel Walker than they do with Mary Katherine Blackwood, the heroine of We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson. One of the most significant stressors for young people is this insistence that they wear different hats, that they fulfill multiple roles with deftness and fluency. Ironically, society insists the opposite for adults, who are often assigned to certain defining roles—teacher, mother, politician, etc. However, adolescents are expected to be jacks of all trades: they are asked to perform well in school, pursue extracurricular activities, and maintain relationships with family and peers, all while they struggle to solidify their own identities. The hat metaphor, then, strongly resonates with a young adult audience that can sympathize with having “too many hats” (489) that do not always fit.

At her home, Libby has finally had enough with Jack’s push-and-pull with both his disorder and their relationship. She calls him on it, saying, “It’s not the face blindness that’s to blame; it’s you. All the smiling and the faking and pretending to be what you think people want you to be. That’s what keeps you isolated. That’s what screws you up. You need to try being a real person” (496-97). Her criticism echoes the same complaint Jack has about Caroline earlier in this section—that she is not a real person, that her identity is constructed based on what she thinks she wants other people to see. Here, Libby tells Jack that he is blind in more ways than one and that it is not simply not recognizing other people. Jack is blind in another way, too: he metaphorically cannot see people for who they really are…including himself. Still insecure about how others see him, he projects that insecurity on everyone else, assuming that the same type of things must be a person’s key identifiers. Unlike Libby, Jack has yet to learn that an identifier can go beyond the obvious, the physical, the tangible.