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 15-16Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 15 Summary
Cindy and Linda leave for the basketball tournament. Vonda, Shawn’s care provider, babysits him when they leave. Shawn likes Vonda, although she is a little less patient with him, and basically ignores him just like everyone else. She paints her perfect nails, and the day flies by. Shawn has his first seizure and tours Seattle: “I feel relaxed, content. I float aimlessly; I am at peace” (103).
Later, Shawn wakes up to a car door slam and hears his father walk in the door. His dad compliments Vonda on her nails and asks about Shawn, and Vonda gets Sydney to sign her copy of his book. Sydney offers to stay the night with Shawn while still paying Vonda for her time, which Vonda thinks is great. Shawn realizes “that in all my years of being alive, my dad has never before stayed with me all by himself overnight. Yet suddenly he’s volunteered to take care of me” (105).
Chapter 16 Summary
Shawn’s father enters his room and Shawn waits calmly, knowing there is nothing he can do. His father sits next to him and grabs a pillow, and Shawn remembers his father’s mention of suicide in his poem. His dad tells him he loves him over and over, explaining it as he makes both of their thumbs double-jointed. Shawn tries to telepathically communicate his love for his father repeatedly.
Shawn notices how much older his father is getting. His dad talks about how he doesn’t want Shawn to be in pain, explaining that when the doctors told him what happened after he was born, Sydney prayed “‘that I could be the one trapped inside your body and that you could take my place’” (109), hating God when they didn’t trade places. Sydney admits that no one knows Shawn and that he could be a genius. Sydney mentions that he dreamed Shawn talked to him the other night, but he couldn’t remember what Shawn said. Sydney admits that he doesn’t know what to do as he rubs the pillow with his thumb.
Shawn locks eyes with his father: “we are somehow together again, like that night in my dream when we spoke. Dad stares not just at me, but into me. In all my life we have never been like this before” (110). His dad tells him he loves him, and Shawn tries to respond but can’t. His seizure starts, and he doesn’t know what his dad will choose: “Either way, whatever he does, I’ll be soaring” (110).
Chapters 15-16 Analysis
Instead of fearing death, Shawn realizes the similarities between his seizures and death. Shawn’s seizures offer him a respite from his anxiety and a kind of freedom, which he realizes death might be similar to. However, Shawn’s seizures also afford him a voice that death will limit. Therefore, even though Shawn’s seizures and death present similar characteristics, the audience must acknowledge that they are not the same, even though Shawn continues to conflate the two.
The audience witnesses Sydney’s belief that Shawn’s seizures cause him pain, as well as Sydney’s obsession with being trapped. It seems that Sydney feels trapped between two terrible options: murdering his son or leaving him to lead what he believes to be a life of pain. Therefore, Sydney projects this anxiety about being trapped onto other people: he believes that Shawn is trapped in his body, and that even Vonda is trapped in the house with Shawn. This repeated use of the same word by Sydney demonstrates the extent of his anxieties about being trapped as well as how obsessive he can be. Once Sydney gets something into his head, he seems unable to shake it, leading the audience to worry that Sydney will in fact kill Shawn, as Shawn is entirely up to the mercy of his father and has no control over his life. Similarly, there are indications that Sydney feels trapped inside his own body, as Shawn leads the audience to believe that Sydney has, at the very least, considered if not attempted suicide. This further aligns Sydney with Shawn in that it seems that Sydney is not trying to kill Shawn but rather to kill a part of himself, potentially the part that cannot escape from the unknown traps of family and life.
Shawn also conflates the line between dreams and reality, creating a final chapter in which nothing is certain, and the tension remains unsolved. This uncertainty lies at the root of Shawn’s life, and at the root of all life, forcing the reader into a position of limbo that mimics Shawn’s own positionality. Shawn finally understands the frailty and sadness of his father that have arisen as a result of not being able to know his son, of Sydney never being able to tell whether Shawn is an idiot or a genius. In this, it seems as though Sydney is trying to kill his own uncertainty; at least by acting, he will have taken a stand in deciding that that his son was an idiot, instead of having to live with the pain of never knowing. In this way, it appears as though Sydney and Shawn are both in a state of limbo from which they can only escape through Sydney’s action. However, it becomes apparent that Shawn knows more than his father, both in knowing the certainty of his condition but also being able to remember everything that his father is slowly forgetting. The final chapter concludes with Shawn’s recognition of his father’s fallibility, a realization that every child must come to in order to mature.
