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Chapter 8
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in These Violent Delights, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Factions, Feuds, and Forbidden Love
Retaliation and Justice
Imperialism and Greed
Moral Complexity, Betrayal, and Forgiveness
Power, Responsibility, and Monstrosity
Summary
Analysis
The next day, Benedikt and Marshall are sent to clean up more bodies of people who have died from the contagion. As they’re cleaning up the bodies, they find another insect. Benedikt examines the bodies of one of the people who has died. With a knife, he cuts open the man’s forehead. He finds dead insects under the man’s skin. When he pulls out one of the insects, he finds that tendrils of the man’s brain come out with it. He tells Marshall that he thinks they have just found the cause of the madness that people are suffering from.
This passage points to the use of the insects as a symbol of addiction, especially when addiction, or substance use disorder, is understood as a mental illness. That is, the novel shows how the insects burrow under the skin of people’s scalps to take hold of their brain, implicitly suggesting that addiction, as a mental illness, functions similarly by overtaking a person’s brain and, in the novel’s view, leading them to engage in self-destructive behavior, symbolized in the novel by the self-destructive behavior of people tearing out their own throats.
Themes
