65 pages • 2 hours read
Riley SagerSurvive the Night: A Novel
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 5: “One a.m.”
Part 5, Chapter 1 Summary: “Int. Dorm Room—Day”
Charlie wakes in her bed in her dorm room at Olyphant. She notices, however, that she is not in the bed but floating over it. Maddy appears next to her with champagne and cake, as is her tradition for Charlie’s birthday. She wishes Charlie a happy birthday. Maddy then smiles, revealing a missing tooth. The gap bleeds onto Charlie’s cake.
Part 5, Chapter 2 Summary: “Int. Diner—Night”
Charlie wakes in real life, now in the diner’s storeroom. Marge has tied her to a wooden chair with ropes. Charlie calls for help, only to find Marge standing in the storeroom. Marge tells her to stay quiet. When Charlie asks Marge if she plans to kill her, Marge says she is not sure. They both hear a car and a man’s voice. Before Charlie can scream, Marge puts a gag in her mouth. As Charlie realizes it is Robbie, Marge pulls out a gun, telling her she will shoot him if Charlie makes any noise. She then opens the door and tells Robbie that the diner is closed. Robbie asks Marge if she saw Charlie and tells her she told him she was in danger. Marge says she saw her with a man but she did not seem to be in any danger. She adds that Charlie left with the man but she’ll let Robbie know if she comes back. After Robbie leaves, Charlie is overwhelmed that he came to help her even though she was leaving him. She thinks that she was wrong to leave him. As she cries, Marge tells her she did the right thing by not making noise and says they will leave soon. Marge puts a bottle of what is presumably chloroform on a handkerchief. She then takes the gag out of Charlie’s mouth. Charlie asks Marge if she is working for Jake Collins. Marge reveals that Jake is working for her before putting the handkerchief over Charlie’s face. Charlie loses consciousness again.
Part 5, Chapter 2 Summary: “Int. Diner—Night”
Charlie wakes in real life, now in the diner’s storeroom. Marge has tied her to a wooden chair with ropes. Charlie calls for help, only to find Marge standing in the storeroom. Marge tells her to stay quiet. When Charlie asks Marge if she plans to kill her, Marge says she is not sure. They both hear a car and a man’s voice. Before Charlie can scream, Marge puts a gag in her mouth. As Charlie realizes it is Robbie, Marge pulls out a gun, telling her she will shoot him if Charlie makes any noise. She then opens the door and tells Robbie that the diner is closed. Robbie asks Marge if she saw Charlie and tells her she told him she was in danger. Marge says she saw her with a man but she did not seem to be in any danger. She adds that Charlie left with the man but she’ll let Robbie know if she comes back. After Robbie leaves, Charlie is overwhelmed that he came to help her even though she was leaving him. She thinks that she was wrong to leave him. As she cries, Marge tells her she did the right thing by not making noise and says they will leave soon. Marge puts a bottle of what is presumably chloroform on a handkerchief. She then takes the gag out of Charlie’s mouth. Charlie asks Marge if she is working for Jake Collins. Marge reveals that Jake is working for her before putting the handkerchief over Charlie’s face. Charlie loses consciousness again.
Part 5, Chapter 3 Summary: “Ext. Diner Parking Lot—Night”
Charlie regains consciousness as Marge follows her to a Cadillac with a pistol at Charlie’s back. Charlie has her wrists and ankles tied; she contemplates running before realizing that escape would be impossible. Marge tells her to get into the car, and Charlie does so, having no other choice. Marge then enters the car and locks the doors. Charlie feels intense fear once again.
Part 5, Chapter 4 Summary: “Int. Volvo—Night”
Robbie, who raced to the diner fearing for Charlie, watches the Cadillac leave the diner. Certain Marge was lying, he has waited for the woman to leave. He has broken one of Marge’s taillights using a trick from an old movie Charlie made him watch. Robbie now sees that Marge has kidnapped Charlie at gunpoint. He also knows that Josh has something to do with the kidnapping. Once the Cadillac is far enough away, Robbie pursues it.
Part 5, Chapter 5 Summary: “Int. Grand Am—Night”
Josh drives back to the diner to meet with Marge. He struggles given the pain from his wound, but he knows he must. Josh served in Beirut and has stitched wounds before, but never his own. The narrator reveals that the supposed special at the diner was a code between Josh and Marge, the steak being a sign that Charlie is the person Marge wants. Realizing that Charlie suspected Josh, Marge reached out to Charlie in the hopes that she, at least, could earn the young woman’s trust. When Josh arrives at the diner, he sees Robbie’s car and knows he is there to rescue Charlie. Josh also sees Marge’s Cadillac leaving. Once Robbie’s Volvo goes after the Cadillac, Josh follows Robbie, hoping he can say goodbye to Charlie.
Part 5, Chapter 6 Summary: “Int. Cadillac—Night”
As Marge drives, Charlie asks where they are going and why she is kidnapping her. Marge does not respond initially. In the silence, Charlie wrestles with her guilt over stabbing Josh and her hurt over Marge’s betrayal. Charlie also notices that Marge’s hair is a wig. Marge drives them to Mountain Oasis Lodge, which Charlie saw a billboard for earlier in Josh’s car. When they arrive, Marge says that she wants to talk. Marge takes off her wig, and Charlie guesses correctly that she has cancer. Marge is dying, so she took the risk of kidnapping Charlie. Marge then forces Charlie out of the car, gun still pointed at her. Marge tells Charlie to open the front door of the lodge, which is unlocked. Charlie does as she is told.
Part 5, Chapter 7 Summary: “Int. Lodge Lobby—Night”
Charlie enters the lobby with Marge. The abandoned lodge is run-down and in ruins. Marge pulls out weapons, including the gun, pliers, and a carving knife, laying them on the floor. Desperate to escape, Charlie runs and tries to open a door. She cannot, only shattering part of the glass. She tries to open it again, but Marge pulls her back and covers her face with a handkerchief of chloroform. Marge then takes it off, leaving Charlie conscious but weak. Charlie again asks Marge who she is and why she kidnapped her. Marge tells Charlie that she wants to talk about her granddaughter.
Part 5 Analysis
In Part 5, the plot twist revealing Marge as an antagonist and Josh as a man she hired builds on the theme of Trust Versus Paranoia, undermining all that Charlie thinks she knows about the two characters. Part 5 expands on the reveal of Marge as a kidnapper and someone Charlie should not have trusted. Marge acts violently toward Charlie, threatening to shoot her multiple times and holding her at gunpoint as Charlie follows her to her Cadillac and to the lodge. Part 5 also reveals Marge to be Maddy’s grandmother. Now dying of cancer, Marge feels that she has nothing to lose and only wants answers from Charlie about Maddy. The change in Marge’s outward personality both frightens and angers Charlie. Charlie expresses her frustration at the turn of the night’s events in the following passage:
A stinging sense of betrayal streaks her fear. She had liked Marge. She trusted her. Charlie had thought of her as kind and grandmotherly—not too different from Nana Norma. As a result, Charlie had gone out of her way to protect her when she should have been focusing on her own safety (238).
Charlie becomes fearful again, not knowing what Marge wants from her at first. When she enters the lodge, she is horrified and disturbed by the items Marge has on the lobby floor, including “a carving knife” and “a pair of slip-joint pliers” (244). Marge’s implementation of weapons and torture devices causes Charlie to attempt an escape much more impulsively than she did when she was with Josh. The narrator states, “She doesn’t care that Marge still holds the gun and that running is impossible and that she doesn’t know where to run even if she could” (244). This attempt swiftly fails, as there is no visible escape route and Marge quickly subdues her again.
Part 5 also introduces the Mountain Oasis Lodge both as the setting of the novel’s climax and as a symbol. The dilapidated lodge provides a visual representation of deteriorating mental health in the face of unprocessed grief. Like the joyful and exciting memories that Charlie and Marge have of theatrical Maddy, the lodge used to be beautiful and luxurious. Now, it is in severe neglect and appears “eerie” and “reminds Charlie of a mausoleum. One filled with ghosts” (239). This comparison fits with Marge’s and Charlie’s states of mind. Like Charlie’s perception of the lodge, her mind is occupied by Maddy’s ghost, an entity that haunts and sometimes torments her, acting out her guilt. Marge’s mind has also become occupied by Maddy’s ghost, though her intense grief drives her to vigilantism; she is about to execute a violent interrogation of her granddaughter’s best friend, one that may end in Charlie’s death. The lodge’s connection to Marge and Charlie’s grief supports The Devastation of Grief, demonstrating in a more tangible way how guilt or rage can cause the mind to stagnate in a state of grief.
Trust versus paranoia also drives Robbie’s actions. Robbie does not trust Marge after his talk with her, stating that Marge “had clearly been lying. In the span of a few sentences, she told him that Charlie had said goodbye when she left and that she hadn’t seen her depart” (231). Because he does not trust Marge, he decides to break one of her taillights so it will be easier to follow her and Charlie.
In Part 5, Sager begins to reveal more of Josh’s true nature. Part 5 reveals that Marge told Josh to leave Charlie at the diner, but Josh decided to take Charlie with him because “he knew he could easily bring her back in a few minutes” (235). He hated the idea of “never seeing her again” and “thought it might be nice to drive a little and chat a bit more. A proper goodbye before he slapped on the cuffs” (235). Josh genuinely likes Charlie as a person; he is merely doing his job as Marge’s hired man. Josh’s actions after Charlie stabs him provide a counterbalance to the real Campus Killer within the theme of The Wrongful Blaming of Women for Misogynistic Violence. Rather than blaming Charlie for acting out of fear and leaving her to her fate, he follows Marge and Robbie to the lodge so he can “get his goodbye,” and eventually he makes the decision to save Charlie from Marge.
In the first chapter of Part 5, the theme of The Blurred Lines Between Reality and Imagination is also pushed further. Charlie’s dream about Maddy giving her birthday cake includes many nightmarish and horror-style elements, such as Charlie floating over her bed “like Linda Blair in The Exorcist” and Maddy’s smile revealing that a gap from her missing tooth is “bleeding—a steady trickle that overflows Maddy’s bottom lip and spills down her chin before dripping onto the cake in crimson dollops” (217-18). This imagery indicates the nightmarish turn that the hallucinations are taking for Charlie, heightening the suspense and foreshadowing the torture Marge has in mind for Charlie if she deems it necessary.
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