Tenth of December

Kyle Boot is a teenage boy who runs cross country and lives in a very strict household, which has made him a person who has a rebellious inner mind. He has a tendency to talk back to imagined versions of his parents, and he often comes up with inventive strings of curse words to entertain himself, relishing in the guilt and in getting away with something under the watchful eye of his father. The central tension of his character is bound up in these rules: His father’s word is law, and his parents have taught him that his safety is the prime motivator of their strictness. Still, when he witnesses Alice being kidnapped, he is torn between his parents’ “directive” and his own desire to do the right thing. Rescuing Alison makes him feel powerful—he has violated his parents’ rules and dominated a man who intended to do violence. Swept up in this victory, he considers murdering the man; Alison stops him, thereby preventing him from having to cope with further trauma and consequence.

Marie is an upper class mother of two who has made her relationship with her children the center of her emotional life. She was emotionally abused as a child, so she is determined to have a happy family. Her lack of class consciousness and her background make her unsympathetic toward Callie, and it is revealed that her outward behavior of charity toward Callie is a veil for disgust and outrage. When she sees Bo chained in the yard, she does not stop and consider any worldview outside of her own, and she ends the story convinced of her righteous position.

Jeff is haunted by the guilt of inadvertently killing someone in a fight, and he is imprisoned at Spiderhead and subjected to dehumanizing experiments with drugs that control his emotions. At first, he is a passive participant in the experiments, but his experience with a drug that causes him to feel love forces him to consider his life from a humanist, philosophical angle. He begins to understand that he has a responsibility toward others, which is why he chooses to sacrifice his own life rather than watch another person suffer through his inaction. He “escapes” by injecting himself with a drug that drives him to die by suicide.

The antagonist of “Escape from Spiderhead,” Abnesti is a representative of Soft Power and the Nature of Control. He uses threats of guilt and punishment and his personal relationship with Jeff to manipulate his behavior. Abnesti sometimes appeals to the fact that he’s not a bad person, just someone who has been tasked with doing bad things for what he claims is the greater good. Even when he sees that his experiments have killed a woman, he is determined to go forward, revealing that he doesn’t feel true empathy for his subjects.

Al Roosten’s deep insecurities are revealed by his narration’s ongoing stream of justification and self-consciousness. Al believes that he should occupy the highest social status even though the world around him does not confirm this belief. When Donfrey is charitable toward him, it enrages him, as he feels they should be equals, and his act of kicking Donfrey’s keys and wallet demonstrates the depths of his pettiness. On his journey back home, he rationalizes and argues with his imagined mother and ultimately ends the story as he began: a petty man who wants the love and respect he is not willing to attempt to earn.

The narrator feels the injustices of class inequality deeply, and he resents the fact that he is unable to earn enough money to provide the decadent lifestyle he wants for himself and his children. He is particularly upset regarding his daughter Lilly, who is entering the age of social pressure. He has bought into the endlessly competitive socioeconomic reality of his world and does not question the way things are, as is evidenced by his attitude toward Semplica Girls. He does not desire to challenge the system of economic injustice he exists within, he only wants a different position within it. His vain desires are tempered by a sense of heartbreak over the working-class life he is giving his children, as he is unable to frame the value of their experiences outside of the lens of material wealth. When his Semplica Girls are freed by his youngest daughter Eva, his need to protect his children supersedes all, but he still isn’t able to see the injustices around him.

Mikey is a veteran of an unnamed war, and it’s hinted at that he has committed atrocities, for which he was court-martialed but exonerated. He returns to his home town as a man adrift and finds that there’s no place for him there: His mother has a new boyfriend and is on the verge of being evicted, his sister and her husband are afraid of him, and his wife has left him and doesn’t want him interacting with their children. Mikey is desperate to feel like he belongs, but he’s incapable of expressing that emotion; instead, he relies on an instinctual feeling that drives him into a cycle of shame and violence. When his family tries to keep him from doing something drastic, he is moved by his mother’s frailty and realizes he longs for one of them to help him return to a postwar life.

Robin is a young boy with a playful imagination who is driven by his fantasy of battling a race of creatures called Nethers and an imagined conversation with a girl, Suzanne, for whom he has feelings. When he finds Don Eber’s coat, he is driven to do the right thing, in part because of his mother and in part to impress the imagined Suzanne. This leads him to fall through the ice, and when Eber rescues him, he is in shock and runs away. His impulse to do the right thing and his realization that he’s a powerless child create conflict, but his decision to run to his mother for help turns out to be the middle ground that saves Eber’s life.