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
After dinner, Lev stands in the tithes’ workout room on a treadmill that’s not on. He studies his hands and thinks identification must be a nightmare when someone gets an Unwind’s hands—but he knows that no one will get his hands or fingers. Most of the other tithes are in the rec room or in prayer groups. Lev attends prayer groups as often as he has to, but he secretly seethes when tithes “shred” Bible passages to justify unwinding. He recites the prayers and hopes that they’ll lift him, but they don’t. If his current path is wrong, he doesn’t care.
The fingerprint identification question is yet another one to consider when thinking about the consequences of unwinding. That Lev is considering it at all illustrates again just how much his worldview has changed, as does his insistence that his peers are “shredding” Bible passages. Remember that for most of his life, Lev justified unwinding in the same way.
Themes
Lev turns on the treadmill and thinks of his blood test results. They showed high triglyceride levels, so the doctor prescribed a low-fat diet and extra exercise. Lev is certain that Mai and Blaine’s blood tests came back similarly, and it’s because they all have something else in their blood—an “unstable compound.” Another boy joins Lev and asks if Lev is going to the candlelighting, a ceremony where the tithes light candles for those being unwound the next day. Lev finds it abhorrent, but he feels comforted that Risa and Connor are still in the Graveyard, alive.
It’s important to take note of the fact that while Lev has turned to terrorism and feels consumed by overwhelming anger, he still manages to hold onto the fact that he has friends somewhere and that his imminent actions are going to help them. This suggests that no matter what Lev says, he’s not entirely alone—and it offers hope that he can come back from this.
Themes
Lev slips into an old trash shed and finds Mai pacing. Blaine pulls out six packets that look like Band-Aids but refuses to say what they are. Mai says she’s nervous because she recognized kids from the Graveyard on the Chop Shop roof and elsewhere. Blaine suggests that they “do it” in two days, since he’s supposed to play football the day after. He finally hands out the Band-Aids and says they’re detonators.
Lev, Blaine, and Mai are presumably going to blow up the harvest camp. Again, while their general intention—stopping unwinding—may be valid, the way they’re going about it doesn’t recognize the humanity of anyone else, since they’re clearly willing to kill countless others to make their point.
Themes
The narrator explains that there never was a job on an Alaskan pipeline. A van took Lev, Mai, and Blaine to a run-down house inhabited by people who terrified Lev. Those people, however, knew what it’s like to feel betrayed by life and to feel like they have nothing inside. They told Lev he was important to their cause, and they insisted that the world was evil. They’d never say that they, or what they asked Lev, Mai, and Blaine to do, was evil. Their message was just as deadly as the substance they put in his blood. Lev knows that soon the world will suffer just like him the minute he starts clapping.
What the recruiters told Lev shows again that they were able to offer him community and a sense of purpose, two things that he doesn’t know how to create for himself if he’s not a tithe and/or part of his religious community. This is one of the reasons Lev is so vulnerable to these people: he doesn’t have the skills to figure out who he is and who he wants to be since other people have always made those choices for him.
Themes
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