47 pages • 1 hour read
Terry TruemanStuck In Neutral
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2000A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 13-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary
Shawn can’t stop thinking about whether his dad is going to kill him. Paul travels for a basketball tournament, and his mom and Cindy are to join him tomorrow: “I try not to think about dying, but it keeps coming back into my mind…I don’t want to feel sorry for myself. Negativity and self-pity are useless” (93). Shawn’s memories run through his mind: Christmas when he was six and his siblings opened presents before they were supposed to, and then re-wrapped them; going to the Pacific Science Center, where his dad convinced an employee to let Shawn go on the virtual reality exploration of the universe strapped to Sydney’s chest, even though the employee said it was against the rules; all the music he’s ever heard; all the artwork he’s ever seen; all people he’s ever met, and the way they smelled and the noises they’ve made: “My life moves across the back of my eyes, across the middle of my ears, and everything I’ve ever dreamed, seen, smelled, heard, desired, loved, hated, been scared of, wished I could touch—I remember all of it” (96).
Shawn thinks of how memory is all that is left when you die and worries that the memory of him will not be accurate, wondering if anyone will truly know him: “I’m just not ready to give up the hope that someday I might be known. I’m not ready” (97).
Chapter 14 Summary
After remembering a lifetime of memories, Shawn is exhausted and falls asleep, visiting his father in a dream. He sees photographs of his family on the wall of his father’s house. He finds his dad asleep and speaks to him. His father mistakes Shawn for an angel, and then realizes who he is, believing him to be dead. Shawn says he’s not dead, repeating that he’s okay, but his father doesn’t listen, believing he lost Shawn when he left. Shawn tries to comfort him, but his father won’t listen: “‘You’re gone, you became an angel because I let you go. Double-jointed thumbs, just you and me. I had to let go’” (100). Shawn starts crying, and his dad apologizes again and says goodbye. Shawn tells him he loves him and that he doesn’t want to die.
Chapters 13-14 Analysis
These chapters are spent with Shawn in limbo, waiting for his father to kill him. In this way, these chapters stand as a kind of metonym for Shawn’s whole life, as to others it seems as though he has spent his whole life in limbo, just waiting. Shawn also recognizes that his time to change his father’s mind is running out, as he seems to know when his father is planning on killing him. In this way, the author foreshadows the next and final two chapters. To try to take his mind off of the anxiety that comes from waiting for his murder, Shawn goes back into his memories. In this way, Shawn’s memories serve as a kind of panacea against the anxiety of reality. Shawn uses memories as a way to combat the negativity in his life, which he finds useless. Interestingly enough, many of Shawn’s memories during this time focus on breaking the rules, such as his siblings pre-opening presents and his father taking him inside a virtual reality machine. Therefore, it seems as though Shawn’s only hope for survival would lie in his capacity to break the rules, which Shawn aligns with his father.
This paves the way for Shawn to break free from the rules of reality by visiting his father in a dream. By bending the rules of reality, Shawn demonstrates to his father that Sydney is wrong about Shawn. Here, reality conflates with the dream-world as Shawn’s internal and external identities merge. Similarly, the uncertainty of reality also corresponds to the uncertainty of Shawn’s future, as even though he speaks to his father, his father seems unwilling to listen to Shawn. Even in their joint dream, Sydney ignores Shawn’s voice, instead focusing on his own feelings of guilt. In this interaction, the reader is made to believe what the other characters—including Shawn—have been saying all along: Sydney is an incredibly self-absorbed human being. It would seem, therefore, that the endangerment to Shawn’s life comes not from his own disabilities, but from an external force: his father’s selfishness. The only hope for Shawn’s future is if Sydney can become less self-absorbed, which seems unlikely given Sydney’s past behavior.
