Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Feed, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Corporations and Consumerism
Apathy, Happiness, and Satisfaction
Resistance
Class and Segregation
The Environment
Summary
Analysis
In the Lounge, Link finds Titus and tells him, “This so big sucks.” Titus is worried that the girl will hear them talking and think they’re “dumb.” Quendy, Loga, and Calista go to the bathroom to fix their hair to adapt to the new hairstyle while Titus, Marty, and Link hang back.
Titus is self-conscious about his intelligence, and wants to appear smart, suggesting he has different values than his image-obsessed friends. In the world of the book, fashions change so quickly that people must update their “looks” constantly.
Themes
Quendy comes out of the bathroom and complains that her lesion is “spreading.” Link says that her lesion isn’t noticeable, and he asks the girl for her opinion. She says the lesion “isn’t bad.” She adds that the face is a grid, with the nose at the intersection of the two axes. Quendy’s lesion, on her neck, is good because it frames her face, drawing attention to it. The friends are stunned by the girl’s analysis.
The young woman is unusually articulate, especially compared to the vacuous style in which the other characters speak. Like Titus, she has a talent for finding beauty in strange places. She can even find something nice to say about an ugly lesion.
Themes
The girl, Titus notes, is “completely youch” to him and the other guys. She seems to be attracted to Link, even though Link is a “meg asshole” to women. Titus can’t stop thinking about the juice she released into zero gravity, but he doesn’t know what to say to her.
Titus is obviously attracted to the young woman—not just because she’s pretty, it’s implied, but because she’s unusually interesting—but he lacks the emotional experience to know what to say to her.
Themes
There’s an interlude of ads, for a soda that tastes like “citrus and butter” and for a club called “The Rumble Spot” that advertises “the veins of the people you love bright as branches against the sky.”
These feed interludes appear to show what Titus is experiencing in his head at all times—a constant stream of bizarre and occasionally disgusting-sounding products.
Themes
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