Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Power, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Power and Violence
Corruption
Gender Reversals and Sexism
Stories, History, and Perspective
Religion and Manipulation
Revolution and Social Change
Summary
Analysis
Neil ends his book with “Apocrypha” excluded from the Book of Eve. It states that the shape of power is always the same: it is alive like a tree, but it is always growing. Its directions are “unpredictable.” It is more complex than people think it is. A human being is made by that same “organic, inconceivable, uncontrollable process that drives the unfurling leaves in season and the tiny twigs to bud and the roots to spread in tangled complications.”
The final few passages again reinforce the idea that power, like a tree, takes on a life of its own. It is complex and more difficult to understand than people think it is. In some ways, this passage illuminates Alderman’s project in writing the book, which is to provoke a thought experiment about how power would be exercised by women. The answer, she seems to imply, is that power would be just as corrosive and harmful as when it’s exercised by men.
Themes
The excerpt (and Neil’s book) ends with these four lines: “Even a stone is not the same as any other stone. There is no shape to anything except the shape it has. Every name we give ourselves is wrong. Our dreams are more true than our waking.”
This final passage echoes the final words that the voice spoke to Eve, emphasizing again that the world is much more complicated than sorting people into the categories of men and women, good and bad. The fact that it is excluded from the book of Eve demonstrates Eve’s continued desire to shape and manipulate people’s beliefs and actions—even though “her own self” once directed her to do the opposite.
Themes
