65 pages • 2 hours read
S.A. BodeenThe Compound
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2008A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 6-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary
Eli dreams of food. After waking, he remembers the history of their food in the Compound. Initially, there had cows and chickens that provided milk, meal, and eggs. After seven months the animals stopped touching their food. Soon the chickens and cows died. Rex examined the grain in his laboratory and found rat poison in the feed.
Eli remembers Cocoa, his dog, and tries not to think about how much he misses touching her.
They had enough food for years, but Rex couldn’t extend the shelf life of anything. Meat ran out when Eli was thirteen. Although they were supposed to last for 10 years, the MREs (meals ready to eat, purchased from a military supply store) went bad. They would have lasted if kept at a 60 degrees temperature, but the thermostat malfunctioned and went to 90 degrees. It was six months before Rex noticed.
Then Rex made a decision that altered them all, and Eli thinks about it when he walks by the yellow door.
Chapter 7 Summary
Eli listens to music while running on a treadmill. His mother comes in and pedals the exercise bike next to him. She is pregnant. She says that he should “visit” the Supplements, and tells him that his father hides things from her.
As an example, she tells him about the reproduction of a Monet painting that is hanging in her room. Rex had told her that he had it reproduced for her when planning the Compound, but she knows that the Monet in her room is real, not a reproduction. If Rex had had time to switch the painting, he would have known the time of the nuclear attack.
Eli sits in the hall outside Rex’s office. He tries to connect Eddy’s laptop to the Internet, not expecting it to work, since the Internet no longer functions. To his surprise, the network connects. Rex comes out and interrupts him. Eli looks into his office and notices that Rex’s Seahawks phone is out of place. Rex never lets anything get out of place.
Rex gives him a CD from the band Cake. When he puts it in his CD player, the label on the disc gets stuck. Eli takes the label off and sees that it is actually a burnable disc with a recent date. Eli looks at his CDs and removes their labels. They’re all fake, with fake labels over them. His father has burned them all from his PC in the past few weeks.
Chapter 8 Summary
Eli goes to his father’s office, intending to confront him about the CDs. Rex tells Eli that a year prior he got an Internet signal and began communicating with another survivor. The man was a music mogul and sent him files that he downloaded for Eli.
Eli asks him about the escape hatch that will let them out of the Compound when it’s time to leave. Rex says there is a time lock on the door, set to open fifteen years after they enter. A code can open it earlier. He couldn’t afford to give it to his wife because she was having mental problems before they came to the Compound. Eli doesn’t believe him. He says that he’ll tell Eli when he can get on the Internet, and not to tell his sisters.
Chapter 9 Summary
Terese asks Eli if he wants to visit the Supplements. He refuses and asks her how she can stand to spend time with them. Then he remembers what he calls the tea experiment.
They had called their snack time teatime. After the milk ran out, they switched to powdered milk. One day Rex made their snacks and Eli noticed that his milk tasted unusual. Rex told them that it was breast milk from their mother. This persisted for days until his mother came to snack time again and gave them powdered milk. Eli knows it was an experiment that only could have happened in the Compound. He views the Supplements the same way.
Lexie and Eli argue. She says their mother has everything she wants and is spoiled. Eli wants to shout that no mother wants to breed new kids to feed to her old ones. He tells Lexie that Rex lies about everything. Lexie says that the two of them are like their father and don’t care about anyone else. Terese is like their mother, which is why she loves the Supplements.
After the arguments, Eli realizes that his father keeps people out of the hall by his office because he can’t stop the Internet signal from going into the hall. He knows he has to get to the hall with his laptop and find out what is going on in the world. There should be a working Internet connection whenever he can get close enough to the office door.
Chapter 10 Summary
Eli remembers Christmas Eve when he and Eddy were nine. His father bought turduckens for a huge work party. His father had insisted that everyone try a bite, even the vegetarians.
He and Eddy hid in the library after the party. Phil, his father’s accountant, had come in with a woman. He told her that he was working on something big for Rex. Phil also criticized Rex, telling her that Rex liked to prove that he could make people do things they didn’t want to do.
Eli wakes up with one of the Supplements touching his face. It is a child named Quinn. Eli shouts and Terese comes in and takes the child with her leaves with it. No one has touched Eli in six years. He washes his skin, thinking about how good the touch felt, and how “a touch like that was not meant for someone like me” (110). He believes he is too bad to deserve touch.
Chapters 6-10 Analysis
Chapters 6 through 10 reveal that circumstances in the Compound are direr than Eli has hinted at so far. His mistrust for Rex grows when he remembers the suspicious deaths of the livestock, and then the breast milk experiment. Eli’s memories illustrate a version of Rex that is meticulous and hungry for power and control. Therefore, he is confused that the animals died and the thermostat malfunctioned, leaving them without meat and a long-term food source. They seem to Eli to be rudimentary problems that Rex failed to plan for, implying that Rex possibly had a hand in making the family’s stay in the Compound more stressful.
His mother’s story about the Monet is the first true acknowledgement that Rex has lied to anyone in the family, other than Terese’s assertions that Eddy and Gram are still alive. Clea’s statement is concrete in a way that Terese’s and Eli’s suspicions are not. She does not reveal the depths of her mistrust, but Eli grows more certain that his father is hiding the truth from them. This suspicion is confirmed when he finds the fake CD label and sees that his father has been recording new music for him on a PC. If Rex can lie so easily about something as inconsequential as music, he knows that he could lie about anything else. The reader wonders why Rex made his two seemingly inadvertent blunders of switching the Monet and burning Eli CDs. He either wants to see if they are smart enough to figure it out, or believes they are too stupid to know that he is lying.
The teatime memory is the first time that Eli refers to life in the Compound as an experiment. He knows that he is subject to Rex’s whims and that he will have to drink the milk until Rex gives up or his mother intervenes.
The reveal that the Supplements are children adds a more disturbing layer to the notion that they are trapped in Rex’s experiments. He impregnates his wife, even though he knows that they do not have enough food. Eli’s argument with Lexie allows Bodeen to reveal the true purpose of the Supplements: they are to be food for Eli and his family if the other food sources fail.
The real horror of the idea is undeniable when Eli encounters the Supplement Quinn for the first time. He is confronted with one of his siblings. No matter what his ideas about the Supplements might be—or his insistence on physical detachment with the idea of it leading to emotional detachment—the truth about consuming a child is forced upon him when he wakes up with Quinn on top of him. Worse, he enjoys the contact with the child.
The flashback to the Christmas party characterizes Rex as a manipulator who likes to maneuver people for sport, sometimes against their own ideals. Eli’s moment of bonding with Quinn, combined with the knowledge of the Monet, the fake CD labels, and the working Internet connection, galvanize him into action. Not only does he not trust his father, he knows suspects that he must work against him to protect the rest of his family. He cannot trust Rex to do what is best for the family; but he can be sure that Rex will continue to experiment with them, whatever his motivations.
