In the novel, there’s a nagging question about Stargirl: how could a person like her exist? Her openness and obliviousness to social customs baffle her classmates so much that they even seem faked. Leo Borlock, in particular, makes Stargirl an object of study as he talks with his mentor Archie for insights and even joins Stargirl on her errands to surprise strangers in need of encouragement. He discovers that there isn’t a tidy explanation for Stargirl; in fact, the more he studies Stargirl, the more he asks questions about himself and his peers. By portraying Stargirl as a more raw, undeveloped version of human nature, Spinelli suggests that human beings should get in touch with a kinder, less artificial, less socially divisive aspect of their natures that’s already present.
Stargirl is uncomfortable for her peers because she reveals things about them that they’d rather not know. Archie Brubaker, a wise, retired paleontologist who mentors many of the kids in Mica, explains to Leo that Stargirl’s strangeness isn’t fake; in fact, it’s more authentic than what the students are used to seeing every day. “If anybody is acting, it’s us. […] You’ll know her more by your questions than by her answers. Keep looking at her long enough. One day you might see someone you know,” he says. In other words, Stargirl is a mirror for her peers; careful study will tell them something about themselves that has become obscured and that, under normal circumstances, they don’t see easily. For example, Stargirl’s willingness to cheer for rivals reveals the deeply ingrained desire to dominate and distinguish oneself from others that surfaces during Mica High’s briefly triumphant basketball season: “Suddenly we were no longer comfortable with losing. In fact, we forgot how to lose. The transformation was stunning in its speed. […] One day we were bored, indifferent, satisfied losers; the next we were rabid fanatics.” Stargirl, on the other hand, persists in associating with and even celebrating rivals. The contrast between Stargirl and her classmates suggests that bitter rivalry, while seemingly natural, is not the way things are supposed to be. The subsequent rejection of Stargirl suggests that she reminds students of something better they have it within themselves to be—they’d rather marginalize her than ask questions about themselves and consider changing.
Stargirl’s differentness, in fact, seems to be connected to buried aspects of human nature. Archie suggests to Leo that human beings are most “themselves” when they first wake up in the morning: “We have just slept the sleep of our most distant ancestors, and something of them and their world still clings to us. [...] We are, for a few brief moments, anything and everything we could be.” He implies that Stargirl is more attuned to that ancestral world than her peers and embodies certain aspects of it in her “strange” behavior. One example of this primordial strangeness is Stargirl’s random acts of kindness to strangers. While Leo briefly dates Stargirl, “We delivered many potted violets. And CONGRATULATIONS! balloons. And cards of many sentiments. […] You would never mistake one of her cards for a Hallmark, but I have never seen cards more heartfelt. They were meaningful in the way that a schoolchild’s homemade Christmas card is meaningful. She never left her name.” Stargirl’s kindness is characterized by childlike attentions to strangers—childlike in sentiment as well as expression. It’s as if she’s connected to a socially undeveloped, yet sincere, version of human nature. When Leo tries to explain that barging into other people’s lives—even in well-intentioned ways, like dropping by a private funeral or giving an injured kid a bike because you truly care—is generally not viewed as socially acceptable, Stargirl begins to cry, saying, “I’m not connected!” She means that she isn’t connected to the conventionality that most people “just know” intuitively and which tends to produce social conformity. Ironically, though, Stargirl is “connected” to something deeper: a version of human nature that isn’t fettered by artificial barriers between people and is freer to express kindness.
There’s something raw about Stargirl. Even her best deeds have an unpolished and sometimes ambiguous quality about them—like assuming that shy kids love having “Happy Birthday” sung to them in the high school cafeteria. If Spinelli argues that Stargirl is connected to a more primal version of human nature, perhaps it’s also true that her unrefined kindness could stand to learn a few things about “ordinary” humanity. Nevertheless, the mysterious way in which Stargirl’s kindness shapes later generations still suggests that her raw form is superior, in some ways, to the more cluttered, stifled kind that has built up over the years.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Human Nature ThemeTracker
Human Nature Quotes in Stargirl
Mica Area High School— MAHS— was not exactly a hotbed of nonconformity. There were individual variants here and there, of course, but within pretty narrow limits we all wore the same clothes, talked the same way, ate the same food, listened to the same music. Even our dorks and nerds had a MAHS stamp on them. If we happened to somehow distinguish ourselves, we quickly snapped back into place, like rubber bands.
Kevin was right. It was unthinkable that Stargirl could survive— or at least survive unchanged— among us. But it was also clear that Hillari Kimble was at least half right: this person calling herself Stargirl may or may not have been a faculty plant for school spirit, but whatever she was, she was not real.
And each night in bed I thought of her as the moon came through my window. I could have lowered my shade to make it darker and easier to sleep, but I never did. In that moonlit hour, I acquired a sense of the otherness of things. I liked the feeling the moonlight gave me, as if it wasn’t the opposite of day, but its underside, its private side, when the fabulous purred on my snow-white sheet like some dark cat come in from the desert.
It was during one of these nightmoon times that it came to me that Hillari Kimble was wrong. Stargirl was real.
We talked until dark. We said “adiós” to Señor Saguaro. On our way out, Archie said, more to me than to Kevin, I thought: “You’ll know her more by your questions than by her answers. Keep looking at her long enough. One day you might see someone you know.”
In the Sonoran Desert there are ponds. You could be standing in the middle of one and not know it, because the ponds are usually dry. Nor would you know that inches below your feet, frogs are sleeping, their heartbeats down to once or twice per minute. They lie dormant and waiting, these mud frogs, for without water their lives are incomplete, they are not fully themselves. For many months they sleep like this within the earth. And then the rain comes. And a hundred pairs of eyes pop out of the mud, and at night a hundred voices call across the moonlit water.
It was wonderful to see, wonderful to be in the middle of: we mud frogs awakening all around. We were awash in tiny attentions. Small gestures, words, empathies thought to be extinct came to life.
Then came the boos. She didn’t seem to notice.
She did not seem to notice.
Of all the unusual features of Stargirl, this struck me as the most remarkable. Bad things did not stick to her. Correction: her bad things did not stick to her. Our bad things stuck very much to her. If we were hurt, if we were unhappy or otherwise victimized by life, she seemed to know about it, and to care, as soon as we did.
A hand reached into the picture and grabbed the mike[.] Becca Rinaldi’s angry face appeared on Camera Two. “Why do you cheer for the other team?”
Stargirl seemed to be thinking it over. “I guess because I’m a cheerleader.”
“You’re not just a cheerleader, you dumb cluck”— Becca Rinaldi was snarling into the mike— “you’re supposed to be our cheerleader. A Mica cheerleader.” […]
Stargirl was leaning forward, looking earnestly at Becca Rinaldi, her voice small as a little girl’s. “When the other team scores a point and you see how happy it makes all their fans, doesn’t it make you happy, too?”
“An unusual girl,” he said. “Could see that from the first. And her parents, as ordinary, in a nice way, as could be. How did this girl come to be? I used to ask myself. Sometimes I thought she should be teaching me. She seems to be in touch with something that the rest of us are missing. […] You know, there’s a place we all inhabit, but we don’t much think about it, we’re scarcely conscious of it, and it lasts for less than a minute a day […] It’s that time, those few seconds when we’re coming out of sleep but we’re not really awake yet. For those few seconds we’re something more primitive than what we are about to become. We have just slept the sleep of our most distant ancestors, and something of them and their world still clings to us. For those few moments we are unformed, uncivilized. We are not the people we know as ourselves, but creatures more in tune with a tree than a keyboard. We are untitled, unnamed, natural, suspended between was and will be, the tadpole before the frog, the worm before the butterfly. We are, for a few brief moments, anything and everything we could be.”
On weekends and after dinner, we delivered many potted violets. And CONGRATULATIONS! balloons. And cards of many sentiments. She made her own cards. She wasn’t a great artist. Her people were stick figures. The girls all had triangle skirts and pigtails. You would never mistake one of her cards for a Hallmark, but I have never seen cards more heartfelt. They were meaningful in the way that a schoolchild’s homemade Christmas card is meaningful. She never left her name.
Stargirl’s face went through a series of expressions, ending with a pout and a sudden sobby outburst: “I’m not connected!” She reached out to me and we hugged on the bench in the courtyard and walked home together.
We continued this conversation for the next couple of days. I explained the ways of people to her. I said you can’t cheer for everybody. She said why not? I said a person belongs to a group, you can’t belong to everyone. She said why not? I said you can’t just barge into the funeral of a perfect stranger. She said why not? I said you just can’t. She said why? I said because. I said you have to respect other people’s privacy, there’s such a thing as not being welcome. I said not everybody likes having somebody with a ukulele sing “Happy Birthday” to them. They don’t? she said.
Susan’s eyes were glistening. “Did moas have a voice?”
The teacher thought about it. “I don’t know. I don’t know if anybody knows.”
Susan looked out the window at the passing desert. “I heard a mockingbird back there. And it made me think of something Archie said […] He said he believes mockingbirds may do more than imitate other birds. I mean, other living birds. He thinks they may also imitate the sounds of birds that are no longer around. He thinks the sounds of extinct birds are passed down the years from mockingbird to mockingbird […] He says when a mockingbird sings, for all we know it’s pitching fossils into the air. He says who knows what songs of ancient creatures we may be hearing out there.”
Shortly after, as the Serenaders gratefully played “Stardust,” Hillari Kimble walked up to Stargirl and said, “You ruin everything.” And she slapped her.
The crowd grew instantly still. The two girls stood facing each other for a long minute. Those nearby saw in Hillari’s shoulders and eyes a flinching: she was waiting to be struck in reply. And in fact, when Stargirl finally moved, Hillari winced and shut her eyes. But it was lips that touched her, not the palm of a hand. Stargirl kissed her gently on the cheek. She was gone by the time Hillari opened her eyes.
The high school has a new club called the Sunflowers. To join, you have to sign an agreement promising to do “one nice thing per day for someone other than myself.”
Today’s Electron marching band is probably the only one in Arizona with a ukulele.
On the basketball court, the Electrons have never come close to the success they enjoyed when I was a junior. But something from that season has resurfaced in recent years that baffles fans from other schools. At every game, when the opposing team scores its first basket, a small group of Electrons fans jumps to its feet and cheers.
