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.
Symbols & Motifs
Mechanics
Shawn repeatedly uses mechanical language to refer to his bodily functions, creating a separation between his mind/identity and his body. However, his body is not functional; therefore, he uses the terms of broken mechanics in order to communicate this. The title of this book, Stuck in Neutral, demonstrates how he feels about his body: his body is like a car that does not function on its own but rather has to be pushed and pulled along by external forces. This terminology figuratively places his body in mechanical limbo, demonstrating the inherent separation between his body and mind, as well as the lack of control his mind has over the function, or lack thereof, of his body. But Shawn does not merely feel stuck in limbo; rather, he experiences a limbo that is broken, in many ways, from reality:“I felt like a machine breaking” (22), Shawn says of his seizures. In using the terminology of a breaking machine, Shawn also conflates being broken with a kind of freedom and escape, specifically the freedom that he experiences during his seizures. In order to escape from the broken machinery of his body, Shawn’s body must further break, demonstrating the idea that he must suffer self-destruction in order to achieve heightened reality.
Shawn also uses the imagery of mechanics to speak about both his father and Paul. Shawn describes his father as coming “fully equipped with a lot of the best and worst stuff available on most models” (23); when Paul beats up the two strangers, Shawn says that he “looked like a machine” (88). Shawn uses mechanical language to describe his father, Paul, and himself. This creates a divide between masculinity, which can be seen as more mechanical, and femininity, which is focused on care and peacemaking. However, it also associates the machinery of masculinity to physical violence. Shawn suffers from the physical violence of his seizures, whereas Paul inflicts physical violence upon others and his father thinks of inflicting violence upon other people as well, namely by killing Shawn.
Invisibility
Shawn feels invisible throughout most of his life. Even though he might be the subject of attention initially, people soon forget that he is there:“After a little while of being with me, people begin to forget I’m there. First they look past me, then around me, and eventually right through me. I become invisible” (52). Shawn’s invisibility is a gradual state that grows over time; although not initially invisible, he becomes invisible the longer that people are exposed to him. This invisibility makes him a passive observer in the events and people surrounding him, and his life becomes like that of someone who watches a television show or reads a book. Of course, it is his lack of ability to communicate that renders Shawn invisible, implying that social visibility necessitates communication.
Of course, being invisible does come with certain perks, as Shawn is able to inspect the people around him at his leisure. Due to his invisibility, many people forget that he is there, and say or do things that they would be loath to say or do if they knew someone was watching and/or listening:“Cindy’s sleepovers with her girlfriends are one of the few places where invisibility has advantages” (51). Shawn is able to learn a lot about teenage girls by watching and listening to Cindy and her friends, who act as though he is not there. They speak about things that they would never speak about if they knew a boy other than Shawn was listening. In this way, Shawn is able to learn things that other people cannot. Shawn is the fly on the wall, the passive observer who watches his life events unfold like a television series.
Positivity
Throughout the narrative, Shawn maintains a positive attitude, always looking for the best aspect of the situation. However, he is also realistic about his condition and the limitations it places upon himself. Nevertheless, he knows that in order to survive, he must overcome negativity, as negativity makes him anxious and uncomfortable:“all 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” (93).
Shawn relies on the good aspects of his life in order to overcome his limitations. Despite his condition, Shawn seems to have led a happy life, or, at the very least, a life with many happy memories. These are the ones he focuses on, and he is able to replay them over and over in his head, like a videotape. He knows that there is no use in him worrying about his life path as he has accepted that he has little control over the matter. Unlike his father, who experiences a lack of control, Shawn has accepted this factor of his life and works to make sure that his life is as happy as it can be. However, because Shawn has no control over his body, he knows that the one thing he can control—his mind—is where his positivity must stem from. In this way, Shawn actually seems happier than many of the other characters within the novel. Shawn’s positivity demonstrates the sheer power that attitude has in dictating a person’s happiness.
Love and Hope
In concordance with Shawn’s positivity, the narrative also expounds upon the palliative powers of love and hope in counteracting negativity. Shawn hopes for many things in his life, some simple, some much bigger. He hopes that his father will not kill him, even though he accepts that this is out of his control. He also knows that the only reason his father would kill him is because he loves him: “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” (12). Due to Shawn’s positivity, he is able to recast the harrowing possibility of his own death as an expression of paternal love from his father. This leads Shawn to then hope that his father will not kill him, as positivity easily bridges the gap between love and hope.
More than anything else, Shawn hopes that he will one day be known for who he is, not for how people perceive him to be:“What if someone loved me enough to somehow break through and discover that I’m inside this body…[a]side from everything else, if I were loved enough to be truly known, maybe that could save my life” (58). Shawn believes that love is the most powerful force on earth. Believing in the power of love allows him to hope for the chance that someone else will eventually love him so much that they will be able to know him. In this way, Shawn’s life is different from that of other people. For most people, love comes only after knowing someone deeply; however, because Shawn is difficult, if not impossible, to know, he believes that someone must first love him. Through that love, they will be able to know him. Although this seems impossible, Shawn never gives up hope that this will be the case, using every tool in his arsenal—such as his ability to communicate in dreams—in order to will this hope into existence.
Normalcy
Shawn does not believe he is a normal teenage boy, or a normal person for that matter. In fact, he adamantly embraces his differences as well as the label that normal people refer to him by: retard. He asserts:
Making us try to copy normal people’s values, habits, hobbies, and traits will not change the fact that we retards are not normal folks. We are different! I call my classmates retards because that’s the word people use when they look at us. Retard means ‘slow,’ but it’s also a word used for a whole class of human beings who are only slow because normal people try to make everybody do things in the same ways and at the same pace(40).
Shawn thinks it is ridiculous that normal people try to assess him using the same tools by which they assess themselves, because he knows that he is different. He believes that in doing this, normal people try to blind themselves to the differences of so-called retards. Normal people, like his father, refuse to accept the limitations and conditions of people like Shawn because they do not know what it is like to be like Shawn. Or, rather, even if they know what a lack of control feels like, they try to rail against it, refusing to accept the situation at hand. Shawn’s attitude towards normalcy and his own differences shows a remarkable emotional intelligence for his age, a kind of maturity that usually comes with decades of being frustrated by a lack of personal control. To Shawn, it is silly not to accept things—like people’s differences in abilities—and to try to exert personal control over situations much larger than any individual. However, this acceptance does not mean defeat, just as difference does not mean inability. Rather, it just means that a different approach or method of assessment is necessary in order to achieve the desired goal. As long as the acceptance of people’s differences remains positive and is buoyed by hope and love, differences can be embraced, rather than shunned.
