35 pages • 1 hour read
Margaret Peterson HaddixRunning Out Of Time
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1995A 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
Coming of Age in a Modern World
The novel is a bildungsroman or coming-of-age story. Jessie fights to save her community and grows throughout the process. Jessie’s emergence into adulthood is marked by her struggle to understand the adults in Clifton. She wonders if “adults everywhere [have] so many secrets” (6). She is curious and wants to discover what they’re hiding, and acknowledges the privilege that comes with not yet being an adult. For instance, she realizes that “grown women had to worry about clothing more than thirteen-year-old girls” (2). Aware of the gendered expectations of adults, she prefers to remain a carefree child. She doesn’t look forward to marriage and children like her sister Hannah does.
The more she explores the outside world, the more she is forced to confront her own ignorance and childishness; she wishes for a modern adult’s strength and courage. Jessie’s coming of age is replete with the back-and-forth between childhood’s security and adulthood’s mysteries. It represents the way young readers of the novel may feel.
The displacement that comes with growing up is literal, not merely internal. Jessie is out of time, displaced from the 1840s into the 1990s. She has trouble understanding her new environment. After growing up in the small town of Clifton, she struggles to adjust to all the noise and people: “It all made Jessie feel unbelievably small. But she couldn’t stop looking around in awe […] Jessie hadn’t known there were so many people in the whole world” (126).
Her reality had been limited to her family, neighbors, and the simpler lifestyle of the American frontier. Once she escapes, her old reality is shattered. She realizes that she has been living a lie; her life has expanded to include a modern culture that she cannot comprehend. Not only must she acclimate to modern society; she must also redefine her identity. This is a metaphor for adolescence in which many children feel out of place and have trouble understanding who they are. They may feel that the world is too big and frightening to understand. Jessie’s experience outside Clifton is an exaggerated, fictionalized adventure meant to represent the typical fears that come with the transition into young adulthood.
The Fallibility of Adults
Like most children, Jessie has grown up thinking her mother and father can do no wrong. Her parents don’t embody traditional gender roles. Jessie notes that while the husband rules in other families, in her family, Pa behaves more like a child and Ma is in charge. She is able to take more childish risks with her father: “Jessie had also talked Pa into letting her help him shoe Mr. Meder’s wild horse once, and the horse had reared and kicked his hooves at her. But Pa had pushed her out of the way then. Jessie couldn’t imagine either of her parents actually putting her in danger” (10).
Jessie’s trust is challenged when she learns they have been lying to her. Although they had no idea that Clifton was a biological experiment, Jessie realizes that they put her in a dangerous situation where she and her siblings could die. She struggles to reconcile the perfect picture she has of her parents with the truth that they are capable of making mistakes.
Before Jessie embarks on her journey, there is a moment of parent/child role reversal. Ma is preparing Jessie for her escape and outlining the risks, and cannot hide her own fear: “Jessie put her hand on Ma’s shoulder and it struck her that was something Ma would have done to comfort Jessie” (34) Jessie must become maternal and reassure Ma that she can save the children, even if she is unsure and frightened.
Jessie carries a growing mistrust of adults into the outside world. She becomes rightfully suspicious of the many strangers she encounters. Jessie also questions people who are never proven to be malicious, like the environmentalist and bread man, because Ma has warned her that “Clifton’s men” could be anywhere. This, along with the revelation that Neeley/Lyle is untrustworthy, exacerbates Jessie’s already wary view of adults.
In the end, Jessie sees her parents and other adults as fallible and human: she notices her mother cry occasionally, her father must see a psychiatrist, and many of her former neighbors from Clifton are arrested. She admits: “’When I was little, I thought you and Pa knew everything, and you could protect me from everything. And now—’ Jessie chose her words carefully. She didn’t want to insult Ma. ‘Now it’s not like that’” (183). Realizing that adults are human, that they make mistakes, is part of Jessie’s coming-of-age experience, as it is with most adolescents.
Fear Versus Embrace of Societal Progress
At many points in history, people have been wary of progress—from fear of 1800s industrialization to concern about the prevalence of smartphones. Jessie’s fear of modern society underscores the fear that many people feel as society and technology evolve. Some see change as evidence of humanity’s imminent downfall. For example, Ma tells Jessie that some volunteered to live in Clifton “’because they thought the United States had become very sinful,’” and some “’were running away from something in their twentieth century lives” (26-27). Though Jessie must escape from Clifton to get help, people originally saw Clifton as a refuge from 1980s society, a place where they could practice their religion more freely or live off the land. This suggests that these people felt modern America was too restrictive and harmful to the earth. It also shows how people tend to romanticize the past—it is either more familiar or far removed from what they see as the “evil” of the present.
Others embrace human progress and wish to develop it, for better or worse. Frank Lyle and his team of scientists believe that humans’ immunity should be enhanced to prevent supergerms. His goal for Clifton is to introduce diseases and strengthen the gene pool of the villagers over time. By claiming that he is working for the greater good, Lyle is able justify the deaths of children from diphtheria. All he sees is the future; he wants to influence humanity’s progress. Even Miles Clifton, who claims he had no idea what Lyle and the others were up to, did not question their mysterious plans. He simply used his money to fund what he believed was a way to further human progress.
Jessie lies between two extremes: the zeal embodied by Lyle and the fear of modern times embodied by the villagers. While she is terrified of the modern world, she sees it as an opportunity to evolve herself.
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By Margaret Peterson Haddix
