Grief, Fear, and Cycles of Violence Theme Analysis

Early on in the novel, Will introduces the reader to “the Rules” which guide life in his violent neighborhood. The Rules are short and simple: no crying, no “snitching” (which Will defines as talking to the police), and “revenge,” which Will says means, “If someone you love / gets killed, / find the person / who killed / them and / kill them.” Though Will presents the Rules as inarguable, nonnegotiable facts, both he (seemingly unwittingly) and others in the elevator (very purposefully) suggest that this isn’t actually the case. Rather, the novel proposes that the Rules are only nonnegotiable for individuals who are ruled by negative, destructive emotions, namely grief. The cycle of violence can potentially be broken if an individual can learn to see that the Rules are the reason the cycle exists in the first place, and then come up with a healthier way to cope with grief.

Will presents the Rules as a way of life that’s been passed down from generation to generation, creating a chain reaction of violence that’s impossible to escape. The ghosts who join Will on his way to avenge his brother, Shawn’s, killer confirm this idea by making the chain of violence extremely clear: Buck’s killer, Frick, joins the ghosts midway down, and Shawn killed Frick. Similarly, Uncle Mark and Pop’s deaths are related to each other: while Uncle Mark was killed due to a disagreement over drug-dealing turf, Pop set out to avenge Uncle Mark’s death, per the Rules, and was later killed as a result. Will knows all of this—at least, he knows the broad strokes of who killed whom, and why—and so it’s very easy for him to genuinely believe that he has no choice but to continue in the footsteps of his mentors and family members by avenging Shawn’s death. Relying on this idea that what he’s going to do is inevitable allows Will to largely ignore his grief and chaotic emotions in the wake of losing Shawn.

When considering the role of emotion in the Rules, it’s important to compare the first and final rules: no crying, and seek revenge. The idea that those who adhere to the Rules cannot cry very purposefully deprives adherents—overwhelmingly men—of a normal and natural way of releasing emotion. This makes it clear that there are appropriate and inappropriate ways of dealing with grief within Will’s community. The accepted way to deal with grief isn’t through introspection, time, or venting one’s emotions—the only correct course of action, per the Rules, is to seek violent revenge. Indeed, Will even says outright that the Rules “weren’t meant to be broken. / They were meant for the broken / to follow.” With this, he suggests that the Rules are supposed to be a way for individuals experiencing emotional turmoil (“the broken”) to cope. But while Will expresses his stubborn belief that the Rules are successful in doing this, his actions and parts of his inner monologue suggest that this is just wishful thinking. Will is terrified at the thought of killing Shawn’s supposed killer, Carlson Riggs, who’s also Shawn’s former friend and a member of the rival Dark Suns gang. When the ghost of Uncle Mark (who was an aspiring filmmaker in life) tries to get Will to walk through the “scene of what will happen”—getting off the elevator, going to Riggs’s apartment, and pulling the trigger—Will physically and mentally chokes when he imagines doing this. What Will experiences at the thought of killing Riggs is, more than anything, fear. Fear, the novel suggests, supplants grief as a person’s primary emotion as they stare down seeking revenge. The Rules, in combination with human nature, make it impossible to effectively cope with grief.

Alongside the ghosts’ implication that the Rules are ineffective at doing what they’re supposed to do, Will also provides evidence that the Rules might not be as inarguable as he’d like to think. He notes that crying a single tear doesn’t count as crying or showing weakness—even though crying a single tear is still technically crying, and the way in which Will frames this suggests that he’s trying to excuse his own past episodes of crying a single tear. Similarly, Will suggests that his best friend, Tyler’s, habit of talking publically about everything and anything sensitive or confidential doesn’t technically count as snitching, though again, it’s very possible to argue that Tyler is indeed talking about things that the Rules forbid. Clearly, the Rules do contain some nuance when it’s most convenient for Will, whereas Will sees them as inarguable when he needs to justify his planned revenge killing. In other words, the meaning of the Rules is, to a degree, up to individual interpretations—offering some hope that Will might be able to rethink or reinterpret the Rules and come to a healthier choice about what he’s going to do, and a healthier mindset about Shawn’s death.

All of this begins to suggest that the Rules simply throw individuals into a cycle of pain and violence from which they feel they can never escape. While Will does seem to gradually recognize this as the novel progresses, what’s most compelling for him is seeing Shawn enter the elevator and cry—not just one tear, but many. Will realizes that while he’s supposed to hate Shawn for breaking the Rules, seeing Shawn cry doesn’t make him love Shawn any less. This incident shows that the Rules can actually be broken, and that breaking them won’t bring about the disastrous loss of face that Will fears. While the novel leaves it up to the reader to decide whether Will gets off the elevator to go kill Riggs or whether he rides it back up to grieve with his mother, Will nevertheless has to face the truth in front of him: the Rules won’t give him the results he wants. Killing Riggs will become yet another traumatizing experience that, in all likelihood, will do nothing to help Will handle his grief. Instead, doing so will only turn Will into a target for someone else who also believes in the necessity of following through with the Rules.