Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Unwind, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Inequality, Injustice, and the Law
Anger, Violence, and Radicalization
Activism, Compassion, and Atonement
Morality and Perspective
Summary
Analysis
The narrator says that people can debate for hours on whether souls exist, but everyone knows that unwinding facilities have no souls. To make up for this, unwinding facilities—now called harvest camps—are in scenic locations and maintained like resorts. At Happy Jack Harvest Camp, the staff wear Hawaiian shirts and the barbed wire fence hides behind a hibiscus hedge. Unwinds see buses arrive daily, but they never see the trucks leaving the back way. Most kids stay about three weeks. In February, Risa, Roland, and Connor arrive at Happy Jack. Two armed Juvey-cops march Connor through the grounds as a warning to all: behave or else. However, the staff don’t realize that by announcing they caught the Akron AWOL, they’ve turned Connor into a legend and boosted everyone’s spirits.
The way that the harvest camps are designed suggests that in order to make unwinding palatable to the general public, architects and designers understood that it was necessary to create an environment that makes it look like teens’ last days are happy, safe, and idyllic. Marching Connor through the campus as an example, however, makes it clear that this is just a front. In reality, the harvest camp is run like a prison and those in charge rule through fear—all the kids in the residence know that they’re in the worst place they can possibly be.
Themes
