Blackout

The NYC blackout plays a major role throughout each story in the novel. While the blackout helps to tie all the stories together in a narrative sense, it also functions to symbolize the novel’s most prevalent running themes, such as love and finding one’s way in life. Thematically, one of the main functions of the blackout is to bring people together, regardless of their relationships to one another prior to the blackout. In the novel’s first story, “The Long Walk,” recent exes Kareem and Tammi walk across Manhattan and into Brooklyn together, despite their rocky breakup and the fact that they have not spoken in weeks. The city-wide power outage and Kareem’s dead cell phone forces them to stick together and find a way home. Similarly, in the last story, “Seymour and Grace,” two strangers in the form of a Ryde driver and his passenger trek through Brooklyn on foot to get the passenger to her destination. Though Tammi and Kareem have known each other their whole lives, and Seymour and Grace are ultimately strangers, the blackout forces the two pairs to work together to navigate through the city. That along the way both couples grow closer—Kareem and Tammi eventually admitting they still love each other and Seymour and Grace deciding to try dating—points to the blackout’s ability to bring people together in times of uncertainty.

Additionally, the blackout comes to represent the past—and specifically the notion of history repeating itself—as several characters throughout the stories refer to NYC blackouts of the past. Most notably, in “Made to Fit,” Nella constantly refers back to a blackout that occurred in the 1970s, during which time her grandparents met each other and eventually fell in love. Nella’s romance with Joss becomes a modern-day version of Pop and Grandma Zora’s love story, as they too develop a romantic bond during the blackout.