Stuck In Neutral

“My parents got divorced ten years ago because of me. My being born changed everything for all of us, in every way. My dad didn’t divorce my mom, or my sister, Cindy, or my brother, Paul—he divorced me. He couldn’t handle my condition, so he had to leave.”

This quotation demonstrates the harsh reality that Shawn has had to face as a result of his condition. Although he does not dwell on it very much, Shawn is burdened by his own feeling that he is a burden to his family. In some ways, this represents fairly solipsist thinking similar to the self-centered nature of his father: Shawn believes that he is so important—and such a burden—that he is the sole reason for his parents’ divorce. From a teenager’s perspective, this makes sense and demonstrates a lack of emotional maturity on Shawn’s part; it is rare that people divorce for a single reason. However, as the reader does not have anything to go off of but Shawn’s opinions, we must assume that Shawn believes this to be true, even though it is most likely not the case.

“C.P. is not a disease; it’s a condition. When I was born, I got brain damaged. A tiny blood vessel burst inside my head and, as luck would have it, this blood vessel was in exactly the 100 percent perfectly wrong spot.”

Despite the frustration Shawn feels as a result of his condition, he is still able to find humor in it, referencing it as a kind of cosmic joke. This quotation demonstrates Shawn’s positive attitude about all aspects of his life. Instead of falling into a pit of depression, Shawn remains cautiously optimistic, often using humor and sarcasm in order to express frustration. He does not blame himself, or some sort of divine being; he does not really even blame luck. Rather, he maintains that this is just the way his life is, playing the hand he was dealt, as it were. This quotation demonstrates how mature his point of view is concerning certain aspects of his life. He finds negativity useless and prefers to focus on the positives in his life.

“All I can do is sit there and drool if my drool function is running, or whiz in my pants if the pants-whizzing gear is engaged, or go ‘ahhhhhhh’ if my vocalizing program has clicked in.”

Shawn repeatedly speaks of his body in terms of a machine; the language he uses is often mechanical, demonstrating the separation he feels between his body and his mind/identity. He feels like a part of a misfiring or broken machine, limiting his ability to feel sorry for himself. The way that he categorizes his body instead refrains from placing the blame on either his body or his mind/identity. Just as a person would not blame a piece of machinery for its failure, so too does Shawn refrain from blaming his body. Rather, he chalks it up to just an aspect of being who he is.

“A lot of the time, luckily, my eyes do focus on stuff and manage to soak up what they’re looking at. But it’s like my eyes have little minds of their own—I can’t will them to pay attention. One second I’ll be looking at something and the next moment my eye muscles will decide that the smudge on the wall is where I should be looking, and that’ll be that.”

Although Shawn has perfect memory, much of what he knows is dependent upon the whims of his body. He cannot choose to focus on a piece of reading material and so his knowledge of some things is spotty, despite his strong intellect. In fact, the way that he views his eyes—and, by extension, the rest of his body—is entirely separate from himself. He presents his body parts as having minds of their own, using his eyes as a metonym to stand in for the whole of his body. In this way, it makes sense that his body does not work together as a whole; rather, it seems separated into parts, each with its own operating system that functions separately from himself.

“I don’t like to feel sorry for myself, but I’m aware of the trouble my condition had put on my family, and I can’t help but feel sorry for them…I do sometimes wonder what life would be like if people, even one person, knew that I was smart and that there’s an actual person hidden inside my useless body; I am in here, I’m just sort of stuck in neutral.”

Again, Shawn uses the language of mechanics in order to describe his situation. He views his body as a kind of car that is stuck in neutral, which is the title of this book. None of the parts of his body work in congress with one another, and this leaves his body in a less than fully functional state. However, Shawn remains positive about his situation, although he also acknowledges the strain that it has put on his family. Shawn personifies the idea of balance via his attitude, even though he does wish for someone to actually know him.

“There is one final bad-news punch line to my life. This bad news is complicated, difficult to explain. In a nutshell, it’s that I am pretty sure that my dad is planning to kill me. The good news is that he’d be doing this out of his love for me. The bad news is that whatever the wonderfulness of his motives, I’ll be dead.”

Perhaps as a result of Shawn’s situation, he is able to see both the good and bad aspects of any event; he is able to find positivity even in something as negative as death. In this way, Shawn again personifies the balance that he sees as integral to human life. He believes that the reason his father is thinking about killing him is solely due to Sydney’s love for Shawn and his desire for Shawn to be at peace. Shawn does not once consider that his father feels that his life might be easier if Shawn was not around or that Sydney is motivated by some other selfish desire. Rather, he believes his father’s motives to be entirely altruistic. Although perhaps naïve, Shawn demonstrates his penchant for finding positivity even within negative situations, a personality trait that seems unique to Shawn amidst the narrative’s characters.

“The thing is my life has always been just kind of in my head. If you think about it, I haven’t really got a body…[h]earing things, or hearing about things, is different from actually experiencing them. I can imagine what it’s like to walk, talk, or sigh, but I don’t really know.”

Shawn’s life is mainly internal; although he does exist within the outside world, he is not able to interact with it. Therefore, there is a dichotomy between his knowledge or understanding of things and his ability to experience them. As such, his knowledge and the way that he views the world is largely internal and based upon his own assumptions. In many ways, this internalized worldview and assumption-based knowledge is similar to the outside world’s perception of him. As he is unable to communicate with the outside world, the people therein do not know him; rather, they assume things about him—like his mental capacity—based on their perception of him, which is limited by a lack of communication.

Shawn also lives in a world of uncertainty and recognizes his assumptions as such. Unlike most people who believe themselves to be entirely right, Shawn recognizes his own limitations. This allots him a level of emotional and intellectual maturity much beyond his years, as well as beyond that of his father, who believes himself to be stubbornly right. In fact, whereas Shawn has accepted uncertainty as a factor inherent within human life, his father cannot accept this, leading his father to try to force certainty in an inherently uncertain world.

“Dad began to talk to cover the silence. ‘How’re you doing, big boy?’ he asked. ‘Everything going okay for you? Any hot news for me?’ He laughed at his joke, not a big or happy or mean laugh, but a quiet, sad one.”

Shawn’s father is uncomfortable by the silence that surrounds Shawn. Perhaps due to Sydney’s profession as a poet, Sydney cannot stand the uncertainty which arises as a result of Shawn’s inability to communicate. Sydney communicates as part of his profession, and he is incredibly uncomfortable at the fact that this ability is not something his son possesses. In order to cover his discomfort, Sydney talks to Shawn, or, rather, talks at Shawn; this one-sided conversation allows Shawn to know things about his father without his father knowing things about himself. Shawn knows how sad his father is, leading him to believe that he really does love Shawn. Because Shawn is a bystander in his own life, he is able to understand things about people—especially his father—that they do not tell other people or possibly even know themselves. With his ability for total recall, Shawn is able to understand people in a way that no one else can; he is able to read and analyze what they say and how they say it, much like a person would analyze a television show or a book. The people in Shawn’s life, therefore, become like characters on a show: ones that he knows but who do not know even that he exists. 

“Dad watched the crow fly away, looked at the broken glass on the pavement, and breathed deeply and slowly, as if trying to quiet and steady himself.”

The broken glass on the pavement symbolizes Shawn’s father: like Sydney, it is broken as a result of a force beyond its control. Sydney has been broken by his son’s condition and is looking for a way to put the pieces of himself back together again. He is volatile, on the verge of something, breathing deeply in order to steady himself as though he were about to fall over. Even though Sydney is in control of his body, he is not in control of his emotions or his life. He wants to be whole but feels like this emotional wellbeing is beyond his grasp and does not know how to put himself back together again. In this way, Sydney is both similar to and different from Shawn: both are faced with issues beyond their control, and yet Sydney is broken by this lack of control, whereas Shawn is able to accept it. Shawn’s acceptance of the uncertainty inherent within his life affords him the opportunity to be emotionally whole, whereas Sydney’s refusal to accept life’s uncertainties has broken him.

“Dad’s fame has made him a professional victim of our relationship; his ‘pain’ over me is the foundation of his career.”

Here, the reader gain insight into the psyche of Sydney, specifically the conflicted nature of his personality. Although his poem did make him famous and allow for him to take fiscal responsibility for his family, including Shawn, it also forced him to capitalize on his own victimhood. As a famous victim, Sydney does not have control over his life, or over the situation at all, leading him to be constantly mired in tragedy. Therefore, he is unable to escape or forget about the situation. Every time he is lauded for his work, he is forced to dredge up the emotional trauma he associates with Shawn’s condition. In fame, there is no escape from his emotional burden, and he knows that much of his prosperity and career is owed to the monetization of his own grief and pain. 

“The whole scene felt terrible. Being celebrated for something you are not, being completely misunderstood by people who think they’re being understanding, is awful. The people who approached me that evening may have meant well, but they were annoying.”

In this passage, Shawn expresses his frustrations with so-called normal people. Even though Shawn tries to be positive most of the time, his father’s fame makes it so that Shawn’s external identity is entirely outside of his control. Even though these people think that they are being understanding, they are actually only exhibiting misplaced sympathy, which makes Shawn feel like a victim. As someone who works so hard to remain positive about his situation, this sympathy causes Shawn to come face-to-face with the pity that people feel towards him. Unlike his father, Shawn does not want to be thought of as a victim, as he does not consider himself a victim. The dissonance between his external and internal identities are made clear the more he is surrounded by well-meaning people. It would seem that he prefers his invisibility to these moments of fame, as when he is invisible he does not have to deal with the frustrations resultant from the dissonance between his external and internal identities.

“These laughter moments in my seizures feel like real happiness to me. Why not enjoy them? Think about it: Why should we care whether what makes us happy is just an electrical impulse in our brain or something funny that we see some fool do on TV? Does it matter what makes you smile? Wouldn’t you rather be happy for no reason than unhappy for good reasons? All I know, though is that my electric happiness doesn’t help my family much—imagine a world where every time you laughed, everybody else looked sad.”

Again, Shawn is able to put a positive spin on situations outside of his control, even though he knows his laughter brings pain to the people around him. He is realistic in this sense, although in an undoubtedly positive manner. To Shawn, who likes to focus on the positives, it seems silly not to enjoy the feeling of happiness generated by these otherwise random electrical impulses. Here, he also questions the reality of emotions, as he knows that they are caused by biology. Shawn believes that feelings are real so long as they are truly felt by the individual. As such, he sees no difference from the laughter that he experiences as a result of his seizures and the laughter other people experience from a funny joke, for instance. However, Shawn is of course not able to laugh as a result of a funny joke; he has never experienced this aspect of humanity. Therefore, he contents himself with his proximity to it, maintaining that his seizures make him feel how he suspects normal people feel, even though he is forced to acknowledge that his reaction is not normal. 

“If I could be William, I’d spend every hour of every workday trying to figure out how to score with Becky. Hell, I’m me and I do that already, but you’d have to figure William would at least have a chance. I mean, he speaks the same language as Becky, and can walk around and smile and do all of those necessary prerequisites to scoring.”

Above all else, Shawn is a teenage boy and the author perceptively captures the inherent sexuality and sexual fantasies that many teenage boys experience. Although Shawn’s mind is not constantly preoccupied with thoughts of sex, he does think about it from time to time; these sexual fantasies often cloud other thoughts in his mind, and he believes that if he had the ability, he would constantly be trying to score with all of the attractive girls he encounters on a daily basis. The audience also witnesses the prototypical gendered notion of masculinity at work here: Shawn believes that sex is equivalent to masculinity and consumes the thoughts of all other males in his life. Despite the fact that William is double Becky’s age, Shawn sees no problem with William sexualizing Becky, or with himself sexualizing Becky for that matter. In fact, he seems confused as to why William does not hit on Becky, clarifying his lack of knowledge of appropriate relationships. 

“‘The thing that kills him [Sydney] is not knowing whether Shawn is aware or not. The doctors have assured us, a thousand times, that it’s almost impossible that Shawn could have any awareness, but it’s that ‘almost’ that makes it intolerable for Syd…. Syd can’t stand the thought that Shawn might be trapped inside himself.’”

Shawn’s mother, Linda, ever the empathetic caregiver, knows that the reason Sydney finds Shawn’s condition so upsetting is the uncertainty inherent within the situation. Sydney does not know whether or not Shawn is aware, and this uncertainty paralyzes his actions. Because he does not know, he feels trapped in uncertainty; he does not know whether anything that he is saying to Shawn gets through or not. He could be talking to a “vegetable” or he could be speaking to a real human being, but this uncertainty makes Sydney feel as though he is completely out of control of the situation. Sydney finds this uncertainty untenable, as it also means that he does not know whether he should kill Shawn or allow him to live. Sydney is then trapped inside his own inaction via a set of circumstances that mimics Shawn’s own situation. 

“You wouldn’t believe the stuff teenage girls talk about when they think no guys are around to hear. And because I can’t tattle, and because they think I’m a vegetable anyway, they don’t think of me as a guy. Actually I’m pretty sure they don’t think about me at all.”

Shawn demonstrates the bifurcation between the inside and the outside world through the lens of his own invisibility. Other people assume that he is not cognizant of his surroundings and so regard him like a vegetable, saying things and acting in ways that they never would if they knew he was aware. However, this affords Shawn a unique perspective on the attitudes of various people, including teenage girls, that most other people never get to experience. His invisibility makes him unique, a kind of superpower that Shawn uses to his advantage. Specifically, he uses it in order to understand the people around him, knowing them perhaps more deeply than they know themselves as they speak unmitigated by social conventions. 

“Then I feel it [the fly] land again, crossing my face, over my cheek, onto my lips, pausing at the corners of my mouth. Is it feeding? Laying eggs? Soon it wanders up into my eye; I blink, an involuntary but appreciated reflex.”

The episode with the fly allows the audience to feel just how powerless Shawn is and be amazed at how positive he remains in spite of his circumstances. With this anecdote, the audience is able to empathize with Shawn. Most people have had a fly land on them at some point and been disgusted by it; the idea of not being able to wave it away seems torturous and highly upsetting. As the audience listens to Shawn recount this anecdote, they are forced to empathize with Shawn, understanding how little control he has over his life situation. 

“I know my mom and dad love me. They’re required to by all the rules of doing the right thing. They love me, but they don’t really know me, and they never will. They can’t.”

Shawn differentiates between paternal or familial love and the love for a friend or a romantic partner who has been chosen. In the latter case of love, one must intimately know the other person in order to love him/her. However, Shawn worries that he may never experience this kind of love, as his parents will never truly know him. Rather, they only go off of their own assumptions, and believe Shawn to be more or less brain dead. Shawn demonstrates the inextricability between identity and love, and by extension the necessary role that communication plays in love. One cannot choose to love a person if they are unable to communicate with them, as a lack of communication prevents an external understanding of identity. 

“I know that the secret to happiness is love, to be loved the way Mom has always loved me, and to love back the way I’ve loved her. Yet now, somehow, I think about a new meaning for love, something even bigger.”

Shawn expounds upon the differentiation between these two kinds of love here. He knows that love is integral to happiness, as a person cannot be happy if that person is not loved. However, this love is not merely a familial love; rather, it seems something more psychological for Shawn. Although biology can dictate love—as in the terms of love expressed by parents to their children—Shawn acknowledges a deeper kind of love: that of the love between two partners who have chosen to be with one another. An important aspect of this love, it would seem, is the relative equality between the two partners: both have chosen to love one another because they both know one another. This is different from the love of parents and their children as parents love their children before they really even know them.

“‘His father loved him enough to do whatever he had to do to end his son’s suffering. Earl loved his son enough to sacrifice his own life to end his child’s pain.’”

Sydney defends the actions of Earl Detraux, who murdered his two-year-old son because Earl did not want his son to suffer any longer. Sydney knows his own conflict is similar to that of Detraux’s situation. However, the two are noticeably different in several ways. Detraux is not plagued by the same uncertainty that Sydney feels. According to Detraux, his son was brain dead and was in inconceivable amounts of pain. Armed with this knowledge, Detraux was able to decisively act to end his son’s life, even though this knowledge might have been false. Similarly, Detraux is not selfish in the way that Sydney is. Detraux was willing to give up his freedom in order for his son to finally be at peace, whereas Sydney is clearly not willing to do this. Sydney is very self-centered and undoubtedly would prefer to remain outside of prison. Sydney understands the differences inherent between his situation and that of Detraux, and this knowledge paralyzes him into inaction. 

“I wake up in my body, tired. I never remember the actual moment of my shift back into myself from a seizure. One second my spirit is out surfing cumulous clouds or playing with the wind, and the next moment I’m back in my body again, awake, exhausted, ‘real.’”

Even though Shawn enjoys his seizures and would not trade anything in the world for them, they take a physical toll on his body, tiring him out. This physical toll then implies that the seizures are not entirely in Shawn’s head, collapsing the differentiation between the real world and Shawn’s seizure world. In fact, Shawn maintains that there is no gradual transition between the two; rather, he is out of his body one minute, and back in it the next. He also puts the word real in quotation marks, again questioning the alleged reality of a world he cannot interact with. This presents the argument that Shawn’s seizure world is more real to him than the real world itself, as he is able to experience things his condition prohibits in the real world. This attitude is similar to the happiness he feels during the seizure as electrical impulses flood his brain. Shawn implies that reality is subjective, and based upon an individual’s experiences. 

“[A]ll my life, I’ve relied on humor and remembering good stuff to get me through each day. To me laughter and memory have always been the best things to fight off worry. And after all, when you’re talking memories, I am the king.”

This quotation encapsulates Shawn’s positivity in regard to his condition. As a result of his perfect memory, Shawn is able to constantly relive his happiest moments so as to not be engulfed in anxiety and negativity. As a realist, Shawn understands both his limitations and his exceptional qualities and is able to use his exceptional qualities in order to limit the burden of his condition. He speaks directly to the audience, explaining his authoritative position in regard to memory and creating a congenial bond between himself and the audience.

“Memory is all we have, for ourselves and for the people we love. The memories of us, once we die, are all that’s left of us.”

Unfortunately, Shawn is not able to share his memories with other people. In fact, his passivity makes it hard for people to create good memories with him. The implication here, then, is that once Shawn dies, his memories will die as well, to be replaced by the memories of people who did not truly know him. Even though this idea must frustrate Shawn, he is able to remain positive, forever hoping that one day, someone will know him enough to make positive and active memories with him. Although his memories are helpful to him in warding off negative thoughts about his condition, they do not necessarily help those around him. In fact, it would appear that other people’s memories of Shawn are tempered by the constant reminder of his condition. This constant memory triggers the emotional pain others, such as his family, feel at his condition. Even though Shawn is not constantly in pain as his father believes, his father is constantly in pain as a result of Shawn’s condition, leading Sydney to project his emotional strife onto Shawn. 

“‘Of course,’ Dad says, then, while inscribing her book, in the same casual, off-the-cuff tone, he adds, ‘I was just thinking, there’s no sense in your being trapped here all night. I’ll stay with Shawn.’”

This quotation characterizes how Sydney feels within his life. Because Sydney is a selfish character, he repeatedly projects his feelings onto other individuals. Here, Sydney projects his feelings of entrapment onto Vonda: Sydney believes that because he feels trapped by his son’s condition, everyone else feels trapped as well. Although he says it in a casual manner, his blasé use of the word trapped indicates how deep his emotional burden goes. Sydney’s conflicted ideas concerning the fate of his son, as well as his uncertainty in knowing how Shawn feels, lead Sydney to feeling trapped by inaction: for perhaps the first time in his life, Sydney does not know what to do. But Sydney is loath to show this vulnerability to anyone else, and so creates a situation in which Vonda does not feel the need to stay. Sydney wants to be alone with his emotional burden; more precisely, he wants to be alone with Shawn, who he perceives as an emotional burden.