2) Speaking with Marie, she brought up an interesting point. Whenever Jake gets distracted from his mission, something happens to ‘snap’ him back into leadership mode. In #11 it’s the Sario Rip, in MM4 it’s the whole going back to before thing, in #7 it’s the Ellimist’s vision of the future and now, in #41 we have this odd vision going on. What do these events say about Jake’s ability to handle his responsibility? What about his motives behind being an Animorph?
Jake always claims his motivators are saving his brother and the rest of humanity (as well as other threatened races), and keeping his friends alive and uninfested. While I don’t doubt that these are goals that do truly drive him, I don’t think they’re always enough to sustain him.
First of all, I’m not entirely sure he even really believes he can save Tom anymore at this point. Look what he says on page 16: "Did he buy it? Did he believe the lies I'd grown so used to telling? The fake-nice routine I put on for a brother who's not a brother at all anymore, but the enemy?" Maybe Applegate didn’t mean for Jake’s words to be taken at face-value, but they don’t account for the possibility that Tom is even existent anymore.
When Jake is faced with particularly difficult situations or when he is exhausted by the terrors and responsibilities of war, he loses focus and becomes apathetic and resentful. This is why I think he is prone to his occasional outbursts of “I didn’t ask for this!” and “Fine, then
you make the call.” Oftentimes, the books follow these outbursts with some kind of supernatural or strange scientific phenomenon that steps into the story to give Jake a good scare, to show him why he is needed, to broaden his vision beyond his own plight. When he is reminded that the whole galaxy is relying on him and that it would be impossibly selfish and disastrous for him to give up, he snaps back into good-leader mode.
Therefore, I think Jake's other big motivator is responsibility--even though the same responsibility that bolsters him is continually crushing him back down into a state of self-pity and frustration.
3) (Again from Marie – thanks!) Rachel tends to get the short end of the stick, quite often. She is often the one ‘left behind’, she is described as descending into her own psychotic madness, and in this book she appears as a gnarled, disfigured version of herself. Do you think KA keeps throwing Rachel into these situations to prepare us for the inevitability of #54?
I think it’s becoming clear at this point in the series that post-war Rachel would have an extremely difficulty time fitting into society. I’m not sure when the other Animorphs start thinking of Rachel as someone who
needs the war, but from her raging at the end of the opening scene’s battle in #41, it’s clear she’s toeing the deep end. The image that kept popping into my head when Jake describes her blindly stumbling and groping her way into battle in grizzly morph was that of Frankenstein: arms outstretched, moving awkwardly, not quite human.
I wonder at what point Applegate decided that Rachel should die, and if Rachel's descent into madness was just as much an attempt to convince herself that Rachel's death was necessary as it was to prepare us for that possibility.
5) In the end, Jake must choose to save Cassie or save the world. His decision, in classic Applegate style, is left for the reader to interpret. What do you think he chose? Why?
There’s some interesting ambiguity surrounding this question. Jake says that Justice would choose his friends, and then he follows that thought with a self-reminder that Justice is a kid. As much as Jake may look like a 25-year-old man, however, he certainly doesn’t act like one. War-hardened and mature as he may be, I think Jake still acts like a teenager (albeit one who is carrying a terrible burden). So I guess the question is, is he still a kid enough to embrace this youthful idealism that Justice—another child who has faced and surmounted terrible evils—does?
As I re-read the book earlier this week, I initially believed that Jake had chosen to save Cassie instead of foiling the Yeerks’ mission. I thought that, if Jake was idealistic enough to keep fighting, he should be idealistic enough to rescue a teammate at great expense. Plus he says on p. 127, “No mission was worth sacrificing her life.”
The more I think about it, though, it makes more sense to me that he pushed the abort button. He already proved in the first chapters of this book that he was capable of making the decision to sacrifice Marco and Rachel so that at least some of them could escape. And he is certainly makes this decision again with Rachel in #53. If the moral of #41 was “save your friends at any cost,” Jake’s actions in #53 would not have made any sense.
7) How much of this book do you think was a manifestation of all the horrible, petrifying, debilitating and terrible acts that Jake has committed since becoming an Animorph? I am specifically thinking about the scene where all of Jake’s dead victims appear.
This book contains some truly horrific images. I remember the first time I read it, I thought it must be a dream from the very beginning. The disgustingly casual way Jake introduces himself as he disembowlels some Hork-Bajir Controller or something is unsettling enough, but then it’s followed by copious images of Jake fighting with his guts literally hanging outside of himself, of his ear getting ripped off, etc. Then the scene on pages 80-83 comes along, when all of the mutilated corpses of Controllers Jake has killed are coming after him—like something out of “Thriller,” but without the awesome dance moves. Maybe it's just my irrational fear of gruesome back-from-the-dead things, but my skin was crawling at this point.
Oddly enough, I don’t think any of this really affects Jake that much. It certainly isn’t what pushes him back into a frame of mind for good leadership. Sure, it wigs him out, but he agonizes way more over whether or not he should attack his father, or whether or not he should save Cassie. We never hear about Jake’s weird half-dead-victims vision again.
If this book is an experiment run by the unknown being who remarks on Jake’s “interesting choice” at the end, I think the being's goal is to discover Jake’s motivators. Here, it discovers that guilt isn’t one of them.
8 ) Anything else?
To me, the book’s most interesting sentence is on p. 92: "And yet when everybody thinks you're something you're not [in context, a Controller], when everyone tells you again and again who and what you are, it's hard not to wonder, way in the back of your mind, if they aren't somehow right."
On one level, this sentence pulls me back to the issue of Jake’s motivators. Maybe another one to add to the list is external expectations. His friends expect him to lead—even Visser Three recognizes the tiger as the leader of the Andalite bandits—and it turns out he’s good at it, so he does.
This sentence fascinates me, though, because of what the context suggests. Taken at face-value, this sentence suggests that Jake wonders if he is, in some way, a Controller. If being surrounded by Controllers is influencing his actions enough that he is starting to act like one. If he should be pitied for being a pawn in a situation over which he has little control. If he is only free to be his pre-war self every now and then—and even then, he is trapped in a cage of caution.
Perhaps even more disturbing is the thought that Jake is like a Yeerk. He dictates the actions of his friends and makes choices that could end badly. His actions can be cruel and cut-throat for the sake of his race’s survival and advancement.
Am I English-majoring it too much over here? Sorry for the over-analysis of this sentence
