66 pages • 2 hours read
Nick CutterThe Troop
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Background
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaThemes
The Continuum of Childhood to Adulthood
The Troop complicates the binary between childhood and adulthood, which are often defined as two separate and distinct categories, with adults taking care of children, and children being forbidden from certain activities to ensure their safety. While the novel hashes out several ways in which “adults” and “children” are supposed to act differently from each other, most of these “differences” erode as the children witness more and more instances of adults not acting like “adults.” Scoutmaster Tim can’t cure the stranger’s illness or protect himself and the boys from catching it. Falling ill, Tim morphs from an adult into someone who is weaker and less rational than most of the boys (excepting Shelley). Now lacking the traits that once made him an adult and a leader in the boys’ eyes, Tim is relegated to the closet, as if he is a toddler being placed in time out. The boys’ faith in adults continues to dwindle when the man who was supposed to pick them up in his boat never shows and, thereafter, no adults from the mainland arrive to rescue them. Even after Max escapes the island and returns to a civilization full of adults, they can’t or won’t help him thrive like he expected they would. At the end, Max feels that “lots of adults didn’t have a goddamn clue. It was one of the sadder facts he’d had to come to grips with. Adults could be just as stupid as kids. Stupider even, because often they didn’t have to answer to anybody” (354). Whereas before, Max held out hope longer than anyone else did that adults would save the day, once he saves himself from the island, he realizes the adults can’t save him from the damage the island already did.
Despite Max’s initial faith in adults, he actually comes to believe that children are more resilient and better equipped to survive situations that seem horrific and impossible, such as what he and Newt endured on Falstaff Island. At a certain point, everyone except for Newt and Max is either dead or seems to have a mental health crisis, and Max believes this outcome is probably because he and Newt are mentally the “youngest,” meaning they still believe impossible things can happen, whereas the others were in such shock that they didn’t know what to do. When people grow up, Max thinks:
[They] surrender the nimbleness of mind required to believe in [horrific] things—but also to cope with them. And so when adults find themselves in a situation where that nimbleness is needed […] they can’t summon it. So they fall to pieces […] They simply don’t believe it could be happening […] [kids] believe everything can happen, and fully expect it to (272-73).
Max notes that this transition from childhood to adulthood is not immediate, but gradual: Already as an adolescent, Max no longer believes in Santa Claus, who he believed in as a young child, for example. However, he still believes in enough impossible things to allow him to not break down in this situation so far.
Despite Max’s belief in the resilience of childhood, the experience on the island further “ages” Max and Newt. Though the boys had the most childish elasticity at the beginning, they survive the longest only to endure the most loss and trauma. Newt loses his childish beliefs first (because he gets the worms), and as he loses his belief in the impossible, he loses some of his hope. Newt doesn’t think Kent could have swum home while he was sick, but Max disagrees. Not having gotten the worms, Max doesn’t understand how weak and tired it makes the host. Newt also doesn’t think civilization will accept him back even if he leaves the island on the boat with Max. However, he lies to Max about both of these things for the sake of Max’s peace of mind, the same way Scoutmaster Tim and the Navy withheld information from the boys in order to supposedly reduce panic and fear. One of the things children aren’t allowed to do is access adult information and adult truths. Adults lie to children supposedly to protect them, but in horror books, this strategy often leaves the children vulnerable to even worse harm. At the end of the novel, Max finally becomes disillusioned with another childlike belief he had: that adults always protect children. As he notes, the loss of this belief is one of the most difficult truths he has to come to terms with during his maturation process.
The Murky Categories of Human, Animal, and Monster
In addition to complicating the categories of children and adults, the novel also complicates the categories of humans, animals, and monsters. Horror novels often break down familiar categories, in part because fear and terror are amplified when things are unknown, or when prior “knowledge” is shown to be unreliable. Of course, the characters already know that scientifically, humans literally are animals, but they still think humans are a special or at least a specific type of animal that can be easily differentiated from other types of animals and from monsters. To emphasize the lack of real distinction between humans and animals, in the novels, humans are constantly described with similes and metaphors comparing them to animals, whereas animals are sometimes anthropomorphized or described using personification. Distinctions get further blurred when Tim first spots the stranger (Tom Padgett): “[H]e beheld a creature stepped fully formed from his blackest childhood nightmares: a rotted monster who’d dragged itself from the sea […] the light transformed the nightmare into what it truly was: a man so horrifyingly thin it was a miracle he was still alive” (22). At first Tim thinks Padgett is a literal “monster”; Tim struggles to process what he’s seeing. He does recognize Padgett as a man momentarily, but even then, Padgett is no longer a typical human; arguably, he actually is indeed a “monster” or at least a chimera or hybridized species.
Parasites complicate the notion of species because they take over a host organism that is a different species. In real life, tapeworms are separate organisms from the hosts they infect; in the novel, the worms are advanced beyond regular tapeworms, escaping the host’s intestines and taking over the entire body including their brain, giving the worms partial control over the victim’s actions. In this way, the worms in The Troop do morph the hosts into chimera or hybrid species more so than regular tapeworms or other parasites do. When Shelley contracts the worms, Max and Newt view the worms as an illness and eventually view Shelley as a “monster,” using “it” instead of the pronoun “he” to refer to whatever Shelley has morphed into. However, Shelley believes he has actually morphed into an adult and a father.
Shelley’s development complicates the categories of human and monster, as well as the categories of children and adults. Shelley wants to become the world’s best father to his “babies,” the worms, and arguably, he does a good job based on his own definition of what a good father is: someone who protects his “children” no matter what. For once, Shelley claims to love something (the worms), but ironically, this love makes him more of a “monster” to the boys. Previously, Shelley felt that “[p]eople were things to be used, peeled back, opened up, roughly dissected and dismissed. All creatures on earth fell under the same cold scrutiny” (260). He had no moral objections to harming either animals or humans, and now he wants to protect the worms not because they’re animals or humans, but because they’re part of him and will continue to carry out his mission of destruction. Shelley complicates even the categories of life and death because he views what’s happening to him not as “dying” but as changing into a different form. In this sense, he becomes an undead sort of “monster” because the worms that emerge from his body continue to live on and cause havoc after his own death.
Lastly, it’s unclear whether the worms themselves are animals or monsters. Although they’re “natural” in the sense that they were modified from a naturally occurring species, they are “human made” in the sense that Dr. Edgerton intervened with the natural process of evolution and modified the genetics of the worms. Max notes that “this wasn’t nature, was it? This was something else” (290), suggesting it matters whether or not Edgerton intervened, despite the fact that many species actually evolve and hybridize with each other all the time in nature. As a human, Dr. Edgerton is himself both an animal and part of nature, having bioengineered animals who are now themselves part of nature as well. The distinction between “natural” and “unnatural” things thus starts to break down along with the distinction between animals and monsters.
The Ethics of Bioengineering and Genetic Manipulation
Many horror and science fiction novels depict dangerous creatures who have been created by ambitious human scientists, such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), and Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton (1990). These novels, as well as The Troop, depict scientists who are so eager to discover groundbreaking knowledge that they abandon their rationality, morality, and safety concerns, often jeopardizing their own lives or the lives of others, including loved ones. In The Troop, Edgerton is allegedly working on a diet pill to help people lose weight quickly, which is not necessarily an evil purpose—though it’s not a morally upstanding purpose either. However, Edgerton’s second, secret purpose of developing a biological weapon is destructive. Regardless of what he was trying to create, though, Edgerton’s scientific efforts cause more destruction than they do progress.
Despite the obvious harm caused by Dr. Edgerton’s genetically modified worms, he is still repeatedly referred to as a “genius” by journalists and by other doctors who speak about his work. In a paper delivered at an immunology conference, Dr. Cynthia Preston says, “Edgerton’s work with the hydatid worm rivaled what Dr. Jonas Salk did for immunology in the 1950s—not in terms of its immediate social benefit […] but in his successful genetic manipulation of this planet’s simplest life-form” (169-70). The fact that Edgerton’s work is still studied and even applauded after the damage caused on Falstaff Island shows that Edgerton is not the only member of society who is willing to sacrifice or risk lives for the pursuit of science. The military seems to have condoned, funded, and even amplified Edgerton’s experiments; now that the island incident is over, other scientists continue down his path by attempting to parse out what Edgerton discovered and see if it has any other applications.
Novels that depict the dangers of bioengineering, genetic manipulation, or other types of scientific inquiry sometimes seem to suggest that knowledge itself, or the pursuit of knowledge, is also dangerous. Edgerton was so obsessed with gaining knowledge that he abandoned all other cares—this makes it seem like the pursuit of knowledge shouldn’t be people’s first priority. Max’s theory that he benefits from his own childlike elasticity of mind (which could also be described as naivete) seems to support the idea that knowledge is actually dangerous. However, the boys ultimately can’t rely on false information forever. For example, Tim and the military both withhold their knowledge about the illness from the boys, claiming they want to protect the boys from fear. In reality, if informed about how the illness spread, some of the boys may have been spared. The novel therefore indicates that misinformation or lack of information can be just as deadly as knowledge or scientific discoveries. The Troop certainly shows some potential dangers of bioengineering, especially in terms of unethical medical practices regarding animal and human test subjects. However, the novel does not go so far as to suggest that “knowledge” itself is ultimately dangerous.
