83 pages • 2 hours read
Octavia E. ButlerParable of the Sower
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1993A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 14-16Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 14 Summary
Paints enter Robledo, set fires, and kill many people in the neighborhood. Lauren grabs her pack and a gun from Edwin Dunn’s dead body, shoots a paint who grabs her, and walks toward the hills to the north, going along backstreets. She wonders what she will do now that she is homeless and alone.
She finds a burned-out house and crawls under it to rest. In the morning, she awakens after a restless night and realizes she must go home. She needs to know what happened to her family, although she’s afraid of what she will find: “No matter. I have to go and see. I have to go home” (163).
She goes in, trying to find signs of her old community but only seeing the dead. No houses escaped the burning. Scavengers are stripping everything. There’s a green-faced paint dead on her porch, and people are ransacking her home. She anonymously ransacks it along with them, retrieving clothes, a holster, food, toiletries, and the money from under the lemon tree. She finds more dead neighbors—Richard Moss, purveyor of his own religion, Robin Balter, Michael Talcott, eight-year-old Lydia Cruz, and many others. She cannot find her family.
Zahra Moss and Harry Balter, looking ragged and bloody, call out to Lauren. They ask if she’s all right, and they sit on the curb together. Zahra says she saw Lauren’s family get caught, and Lauren understands that she saw this while being raped. Harry helped her, but the attacker hit him on the head as they tried to get away.
Chapter 15 Summary
Harry has a concussion and needs time to heal. Neither Lauren nor Zahra wants to abandon him, and it’s Sunday, so they rest. They also talk about what happened, how Zahra saw her daughter killed. Harry saved Zahra, and they ran and hid, then wandered until they found Lauren. Lauren tells Zahra that she saw her husband Richard’s body. Zahra steals some peaches for them to eat.
Lauren tells Harry that he might be able to get to Olivar. The Garfields would take him in, but Harry doesn’t want to go there. Lauren says she’s going north toward Canada, where she always intended to go, and Harry says he was planning to go north as well. Lauren tells them she will travel as a man; they can go as a Black couple and their white friend. Zahra starts to cry because she thought they were going to leave her behind. When she notes that she has no money, Lauren says she can steal for them and reassures them: “I mean to survive” (178).
They go to Hanning Joss, a secure complex where people can buy supplies. Lauren gets food, water, sunblock, ointments, toilet paper, pens, tampons, lip balm, notebooks, pens, and ammunition. She also gets sleep sacks and jackets for the three of them.
The small group walks down to the 118 Freeway afterward. Their path will take them to the 23 and then to US 101 to go up the coast. Many people walk the freeways with them because they are the most direct routes between cities. There’s a wide variety of people, from predators to families. Lauren thinks she will soon have to tell Harry and Zahra about her hyperempathy, yet she hesitates: “It’s no small thing to commit yourself to other people” (184).
Chapter 16 Summary
They continue to walk for a lengthy period. They consider how they’re going to survive in this wilderness. Zahra, who has more outside experience than the other two, tells them of the dangers: “Nobody’s safe” (186). Lauren is wary of Harry because he tends to want to help people, and he’s having trouble seeing his old neighborhood friends as cold-hearted survivalists who would shoot people to keep their supplies.
They set a watch at their little camp. Zahra sees Lauren writing and wants to learn how to do it, so Lauren agrees. They talk about their lives in the neighborhood and how they didn’t really like each other. Lauren didn’t like Zahra because she was beautiful, and Zahra didn’t like Lauren because she was a preacher’s kid and up in everyone’s business. Lauren explains that she was trying to learn survival skills, just in case.
She switches watch duty with Harry and wakes up when she hears a shout. A body falls on top of her. A couple of men are fighting with Harry over their gun. She hits one with a rock, and Harry kills the other. The man she has hit isn’t dead yet. She cuts his throat with a knife and tells her friends to strip the bodies of valuables. Then they move their camp.
Lauren decides this is the time to tell them about her “sharing.” Harry disapproves of her action in killing the man, but she tells him the reality of their situation: “I might have to do it again” (197). She asks them what they think. Zahra replies, “You ain’t got nothing wrong with you, Lauren—nothing worth worrying about” (198). Harry tries to come to terms with the new things he’s learning about his old friend—her seeming cold-bloodedness, her hyperempathy, and Earthseed. He asks if she will read him something to reassure him: “I feel as though…as though you’re a lie. I don’t know you. Show me something of you that’s real” (200). She shows him a verse from her book.
Chapters 14-16 Analysis
These chapters include the big event that acts as a catalyst for Lauren’s future—the catastrophic burning of her neighborhood. In a way, it’s a surprise, as the community has been there for so long. However, Lauren has been anticipating Robledo’s destruction since the beginning of the novel. Similar to other meditations on destruction and rebirth throughout the book, the tragedy marks the beginning of Lauren’s journey toward liberation and the beginning of Earthseed. This imagery is deepened by the town’s name—Robledo means “oakwood” in Spanish, making its burning akin to a forest fire. While devastating, forest fires enrich the forest’s soil, leaving fertile ground for new life.
As Lauren is a preacher’s daughter, Christian allusions have peppered other chapters, like Lauren referring to Robledo’s outer wall as the Wall of Jericho. In her role as a prophet or messiah figure, Lauren’s journey from Chapter 14 onward reflects similar journeys in the Bible. One occurs in Exodus after Moses liberates the Israelites and they flee Egypt. During their exodus, they wander through the wilderness, and while the journey is difficult, God provides food and water, giving them what they need to survive. However, after disobeying God’s command to invade Canaan, they are sentenced to wander the desert for 40 years before they enter the promised land.
This biblical allusion foreshadows the difficulty of Lauren, Harry, and Zahra’s journey north and suggests that establishing Earthseed will not be easy. This is proven true as their exodus begins: they endure hard travel by foot, constant watches against thieves, trips to the store that must be done while guarding their supplies, constant vigilance against attacks, and the need to strip bodies for their resources. It’s a tough world, and Lauren and her friends must adapt to be part of it: “We weren’t strong enough to survive slowness or stupid mistakes” (195). At the same time, the biblical Exodus established the tenets of the Jewish faith—it was on this journey that Moses received the Ten Commandments from God—hinting that this journey will round out and cement Earthseed’s ideology
Their new and dire situation requires the trio to learn things about each other they had not known before, which are not necessarily conducive to forming them into a unit. Harry, a good and honorable person, sees Lauren as a friend, but watching her kill an injured person changes his view of her. Zahra turns out to be a skilled thief. Lauren must, for her own sake as well as theirs, tell them about how her hyperempathy might incapacitate them if they’re in trouble. While Lauren is afraid of sharing this piece of herself, she knows that honest communication will be necessary for their survival, emphasizing the theme of Community Versus the Individual. However, in Exodus, many of the Israelites’ struggles come from clashes in the group dynamic or refusing to follow the commandments handed down to Moses by God. This gestures toward difficulties in the group dynamic going forward.
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