57 pages • 1 hour read
Rebecca SteadLiar & Spy
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Coping with Change and Adversity
Georges is facing a time of life-altering change; his father has lost his job, they’ve had to sell their family home, and Georges’s mother is in the hospital being treated for a serious infection. Through Georges’s unsuccessful efforts to cope with these losses and stresses by detaching from them, the novel reveals the dangers of avoidance and denial when confronting adversity. In interviews, Stead has noted that too much meekness and passivity can backfire in bullying situations; while it may be reassuring to focus on the idea that things will get better in time, there’s a danger in that philosophy too, for those who choose such an approach often fail to advocate for themselves.
Georges compartmentalizes the various aspects of his life and walls himself off from the things that worry or upset him. This pattern can be seen in the narrative whenever he separates the bullying incidents from himself by decreeing them to be “little things,” “dumb stuff,” and “kids being kids” (149, 176). While this approach allows him to endure the bullying, it also requires him to absorb a constant stream of anxiety and negativity. He thinks of himself at school as a “hard” version of himself, saying that “nothing can hurt him,” but he also notes that he’s lost the “soft G” in the process. As Georges’s narration states, “the soft G is the one who’s talking to you right now. Except he’s only talking in my head. I used to know which one was the real me, but now I’m not sure. Now it’s maybe like there is no real me” (111). There are so many changes and painful things happening in Georges’s life that he slowly numbs himself to what is truly important in an attempt to avoid what is unpleasant.
Georges’s tendency to cope by avoidance is seen in his reactions to moving and to his mother’s illness as well. Though Georges is devastated by the loss of their home, he does not express or share his feelings, even when his father asks him to. Georges’s empathy works against him in this instance, as he doesn’t want to make his father feel even worse by telling him about the bullying. Georges’s mother’s illness—and the possibility of her death—is so painful and frightening to Georges that he cannot acknowledge that it is happening, even to himself. He obscures the evidence of her absence from both himself and the reader by pretending that everything is normal and that she is simply working long shifts at the hospital. As with the bullying, Georges’s avoidance of the truth does not help him to cope with the fear and pain. It is not until he acknowledges it and moves through it that he can finally reach a new place of stability and emotional resolution.
Finding Safety in Community
Georges’s alienation from the other students makes him vulnerable to Carter and Dallas’s bullying. When he begins to seek out and befriend other students who are equally alienated, however, he begins to build a solid community for himself. The first step towards community-building is arguably Georges’s budding friendship with Bob English. They initially find common ground in their isolated social status, and when Bob English shows Georges the weirder sides of him, the interests that would likely get him bullied by another student, Georges accepts them without ridicule. The second step to building a school community comes when Georges is chosen to be the captain of the Blue Team. By deliberately choosing the typically last-chosen of the group, Georges unites the formerly isolated students and boosts their morale. They take pride in their community and in their rejection of the game’s rules, instead enjoying jailbreaking their captured team members. As a group, they are able to resist the more dominant students like Dallas and Mandy because they know they will have support and will not have to face the bullies alone.
It is this community that Georges recruits to subvert Dallas’s plans for using the taste test to shame and bully the minority of students who are unable to taste the chemical. Bob English points out that Georges could always pretend to taste the chemical, thus avoiding Dallas and Carter’s designation of him as the weirdest kid in school. Eventually, Georges realizes that they can subvert the “rules” of the taste test in a different way: by pretending that none of the Blue Team can taste the chemical. Once again, the Blue Team, comprised of the outcasts and bullying victims of the school, refuses to play by the “cool” kids’ rules, and in this way, they disrupt the expected power hierarchy and deprive the bullies of the social leverage needed to maintain control.
Georges’s plan is influenced by Candy’s careless dismissal of the lunchroom social hierarchy that Georges describes to her. Candy says that she would simply declare her own table to be the cool table, and that she would let anyone sit there who wanted to. When Georges tells her that’s the rules don’t work that way, she gets annoyed and insists that he’s not allowing her to sit at the cool table. Georges directly references this exchange when he is formulating his taste test plan, asking, “Why shouldn’t her table be the cool table? Who says I have to try to steal the other team’s flag? Why does Bob have to spell dumb with a B? What if you decided to make your own rules?” (149). These coinciding revelations connect the novel’s motif of rules to the theme of Finding Safety in Community; the novel explores the social hierarchy of junior high, so there is an emphasis on social rules and the consequences faced by those who cannot conform to them.
The Big Picture Versus the Daily Details
Georges’s mother has articulated a worldview that there is a “big picture” that is more important than any of the “little things” that happen on a day-to-day basis. She associates this with the pointillist painting style used by Georges Seurat, Georges’s namesake and the artist whose print hangs over the family’s living room couch. Georges explains, “Mom says that our Seurat poster reminds her to look at the big picture. Like when it hurts to think about selling the house, she tells herself how that bad feeling is just one dot in the giant Seurat painting of our lives” (11). This theme also ties into that of Coping with Change and Adversity, for it provides the framing that Georges uses to detach from the bullying and the other painful realities of his family’s situation. Accordingly, he thinks of Dallas and Carter’s verbal and physical jabs as dots that should be ignored in favor of appreciating the larger picture instead. By training his attention away from the unpleasant daily minutiae of his life, Georges is theoretically maintaining a healthy perspective on life. However, as Georges’s father points out, the little things that happen to us accumulate; having so many hurtful things happen builds up to create a larger sense of misery that cannot be solved by stubbornly refusing to see it or deal with it. This theme develops into an argument for balance between the two—the big picture and the little things. Georges’s focus on the big picture does help him to endure Dallas and Carter’s bullying, but it is only when he accepts that the little things also matter that he is finally able to enact change in his life. When he does so, he improves not only his own circumstances, but also those of the other outcasts and targets of Dallas’s bullying.
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By Rebecca Stead
