In the world of Unwind, many seem to think that they live in a utopia. Any injury, disorder, or illness is curable, since science and medicine are advanced enough to simply replace the ill or defective body part with a brand-new, healthy one—and those with the money and inclination can “upgrade” body parts simply because they want to for aesthetic reasons. To many people in society, this is a perfectly moral and just system. To others, especially the novel’s most vulnerable individuals, the world feels more like a dystopia, as many live in fear that their lives will effectively end as soon as they reach their teen years and are unwound in order to have their organs. As Connor finds himself immersed in the underground resistance movement against unwinding and discovers meaning and purpose in unexpected places, Unwind encourages readers to understand that within both the novel and the reader’s world, utopia versus dystopia, and morality versus immorality are, to some degree, simply a matter of perspective. The book makes the case that it’s possible to the exact same situation in a variety of different ways, depending on who a person is and his or her outlook on life.
At first, Connor is convinced that his entire world is horrible and dysfunctional. Kids disappear from school with shocking regularity, presumably to be unwound. As he faces down his own unwinding, he’s forced to confront the cruelty and lack of respect that permeates his world. Risa has a similar experience as a ward of the state, as she grows up knowing that she has to do everything in her power to make herself useful so that the state doesn’t choose to unwind her. Though both Connor and Risa see their world as a dystopia, Lev, meanwhile, sees his life as more or less utopian. As a tithe, he’s spent his entire life being treated better than his nine siblings, and his religion states that unwinding in general and tithing in particular are the best ways to make the world at large just as utopian as it is in Lev’s experience. These differences in lifestyle, upbringing, and experience are early indicators that what makes something paradise or not can simply be a matter of differing outlooks on life, something the novel supports further when an asthmatic Unwind named Emby points out that he wouldn’t be alive at all had he not received an Unwind’s lung as a child. For him, it’s impossible to ignore or discredit the fact that the system which now seeks to deprive him of his life—one that others consider inhumane—is also the reason he’s alive in the first place. In this sense, it’s possible for someone to take either side (or even both sides) of the debate surrounding whether unwinding is positive or inhumane, depending on one’s circumstances, experience with unwinding, and how he or she was raised to think about the practice.
Unwind further complicates the idea of utopias and dystopias through its descriptions of the Graveyard and the Happy Jack Harvest Camp. Even though, on the surface, the Graveyard looks like a dystopia and the harvest camp a utopia, it’s really the other way around. When Connor first arrives at the Graveyard, he sees it as a desolate and horrific space—it’s in the extremely hot Arizona desert and doesn’t seem much better than being on the run alone. However, it doesn’t take long for Connor to realize that the Graveyard looks like this by design (its desolate appearance makes it less likely that the wrong person will discover it) and that it is actually the safest, happiest, and most meaningful place for an Unwind to live until he or she old enough to be safe from unwinding. Happy Jack, as well as all the other harvest camps, are the exact opposite. Harvest camps are designed to look like resorts, with beautiful landscaping and amenities—but the simple fact that they’re the site of unwinding causes even the narrator to insist that the camps are “soulless,” and both Connor and Risa pick up on the undercurrent of terror that permeates the beautiful landscape. In short, those who developed the plans for the harvest camps understood that in order to make unwinding more palatable, they needed to create the illusion that a teen’s last days are fun, safe, and idyllic.
Ultimately, the fate of CyFi is the most compelling condemnation of the supposedly moral system of unwinding. Though he’s well aware that he’s alive and well because he received a temporal lobe from an Unwind, living with part of another person’s brain in his head literally gives him another perspective on unwinding, as he sometimes experiences thoughts, emotions, or memories that belong to the brain’s former owner, a boy named Tyler. Lev accompanies CyFi on a journey to Joplin, Missouri, and witnesses CyFi, overwhelmed by the emotions in Tyler’s temporal lobe, throw himself at the feet of Tyler’s parents and beg to not be unwound. Tyler (and, it’s implied, all Unwinds) aren’t aware that they’ve been unwound, and instead spend the rest of their divided existence confused and frustrated by their hosts’ control over their minds and, possibly, their other body parts. Though CyFi appears to recover after his breakdown in front of Tyler’s parents, his outburst, coupled with the novel’s later graphic description of the unwinding process, begins to suggest that while unwinding may represent an ideal in some ways, it only takes a little bit of perspective—like seeing CyFi/Tyler’s breakdown and the unwinding process from inside the head of someone being unwound—to understand that unwinding is actually anything but. With this, the novel emphasizes that gaining perspective is the only way to begin to see the underlying truth of any such situation.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Morality and Perspective ThemeTracker
Morality and Perspective Quotes in Unwind
“Please, Miss Ward. It’s not dying, and I’m sure everyone here would be more comfortable if you didn’t suggest something so blatantly inflammatory. The fact is, 100% of you will still be alive, just in a divided state.”
“Anyway, since it was legally ours, we paid for the funeral. It didn’t even have a name, and my parents couldn’t bear to give it one. It was just ‘Baby Lassiter,’ and even though no one had wanted it, the entire neighborhood came to the funeral. People were crying like it was their baby that had died...And that’s when I realized that the people who were crying—they were the ones who had passed that baby around. They were the ones, just like my own parents, who had a hand in killing it.”
“People shouldn’t do a lot of things,” says Connor. He knows they’re both right, but it doesn’t make a difference. In a perfect world mothers would all want their babies, and strangers would open up their homes to the unloved. In a perfect world everything would be either black or right, right or wrong, and everyone would know the difference. But this isn’t a perfect world. The problem is people who think it is.
Please what? the teacher thinks. Please break the law? Please put myself and the school at risk? But, no, that’s not it at all. What he’s really saying is: Please be a human being. With a life so full of rules and regiments, it’s so easy to forget that’s what they are. She knows—she sees—how often compassion takes a back seat to expediency.
There’s nothing keeping them tied to this baby anymore. They could stork it again first thing in the morning [...] And yet the thought makes Connor uncomfortable. They don’t owe this baby anything. It’s theirs by stupidity, not biology. He doesn’t want it, but he can’t stand the thought of someone getting the baby who wants it even less than he does.
“You think this makes me a saint? Let me tell you, I’ve had a considerably long life, and I’ve done some pretty awful things, too.”
“Well, I don’t care. No matter how many times you smack me with that cane, I think you’re decent.”
“Maybe, maybe not. One thing you learn when you’ve lived as long as I have—people aren’t all good, and people aren’t all bad. We move in and out of darkness and light all of our lives. Right now, I’m pleased to be in the light.”
Lev had agreed to go with him because he knew the two filled a need in each other. CyFi was like a preacher with no flock. He couldn’t exist without an audience, and Lev needed someone who could fill his head with ideas, to replace the lifetime of ideas that had been taken from him.
“He’s not a bad kid. He’s just hurting. Hurting real bad.” The way Cy’s talking, it’s like the kid is still there, right in the room with them. “He’s got this urge about him to grab things—like an addiction, y’know? Shiny things mostly. It’s not like he really wants them, it’s just that he kind of needs to snap ‘em up. I figure he’s a kleptomaniac.”
“You might think I’m stupid, but I got a good reason for the way I feel,” Emby says. “When I was little, I was diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis. Both my lungs were shutting down. I was gonna die. So they took out both my dying lungs and gave me a single lung from an Unwind. The only reason I’m alive is because that kid got unwound.”
“So,” says Connor, “Your life is more important than his?”
“He was already unwound—it’s not like I did it to him. If I didn’t get that lung, someone else would have.”
“The unborn have souls. They have their souls from the moment they get made—the law says.”
Connor doesn’t want to get into it again with Emby, but he can’t help himself. “Just because the law says it, that doesn’t make it true.”
“Yeah, well, just because the law says it, that doesn’t make it false, either. It’s only the law because a whole lot of people thought about it, and decided it made sense.”
And all at once Cy realizes that Tyler doesn’t know. The part of that boy which comprehends time and place isn’t here, and never will be. Tyler can’t understand that he’s already gone, and nothing Cy can do will ever make him understand. So he goes on wailing.
“Then we proposed the idea of unwinding, which would terminate unwanteds without actually ending their lives. We thought it would shock both sides into seeing reason—that they would stare at each other across the table and someone would blink. But nobody blinked. The choice to terminate without ending life—it satisfied the needs of both sides. The Bill of Life was signed, the Unwind Accord went into effect, and the war was over. Everyone was so happy to end the war, no one cared about the consequences.”
“Of course, if more people had been organ donors, unwinding never would have happened...but people like to keep what’s theirs, even after they’re dead. It didn’t take long for ethics to be crushed by greed. Unwinding became big business, and people let it happen.”
In her mind’s eye she always pictured harvest camps as human cattle stockades: dead-eyed crowds of malnourished kids in small gray cells—a nightmare of dehumanization. Yet somehow this picturesque nightmare is worse. Just as the airplane graveyard was Heaven disguised as Hell, harvest camp is Hell masquerading as Heaven.
“What do you do with the club feet, and the deaf ears? Do you use those in transplants?”
“You don’t have either of those, do you?”
“No—but I do have an appendix. What happens to that?”
“Well,” says the counselor with near infinite patience, “a deaf ear is better than no ear at all, and sometimes it’s all people can afford. And as for your appendix, nobody really needs that anyway.”
“How can you do this?” she asks during one of their breaks. “How can you watch them day after day, going in and never coming out?”
“You get used to it,” the drummer tells her, taking a swig of water. “You’ll see.”
“I won’t! I can’t!” She thinks about Connor. He doesn’t have this same reprieve from unwinding. He doesn’t stand a chance. “I can’t be an accomplice to what they’re doing!”
“You may be responsible for your actions,” Pastor Dan says, “but it’s not your fault you weren’t emotionally prepared for life out there in the real world. This was my fault—and the fault of everyone who raised you to be a tithe. We’re as guilty as the people who pumped that poison into your blood.”
