Annotated Bibliography – Reboot [Amy Tintera]
I was always a shy kid.
And so, like most shy kids, I found myself in the company of books more often than I found myself in the company of people. My classmates would get scolded for sneaking toys into the classroom, while I would get scolded for reading under my desk while I was supposed to be listening to the teacher. I hungered for books, quickly finding myself at a higher reading level than my peers. This may be part of why YA feels so comfortable for me to read – it’s familiar, nostalgic even. It reminds me of simpler times where I was a wallflower, connecting to the world through the written word instead of the spoken one.
My anxiety prevented me from experiencing many things, and so that as well was supplemented by books. I began to hunt for things I felt I would never be able to experience in my life, finding a love for fantasy equaled by a fascination with stories about bleak reality. I became an observer, watching the world through a foggy window, perfectly content with the distance between myself and everything else. Stories were my lens, my conduit, some kind of divining tool in which I’d scry into the lives of others both real and fictional. I wanted to relate to that which I inherently could not relate to, to see my own ideas reflected and challenged on the page before me, and share in the ideas and thoughts of people I’d never meet.
When choosing a novel to read for this class, all of those things were what drew me to Reboot. The concept caught my attention immediately, as it was a novel about undeath, a subject that always fascinated me as both a writer and a reader. I also found myself drawn to the main character, Wren, who was described as lacking in humanity and unable to relate to others. Though I have no supernatural condition that suppresses my emotions, my introverted nature has always made it hard for me to understand the emotions of myself and others, let alone express them clearly. I find myself drawn to character arcs revolving around the question of what is Humanity? What does it mean to be human? I am human, undeniably, yet I’ve lived so disconnected from my own species that I don’t know the answer to that question myself. That is why I find myself so drawn to stories that pose that very question, for perhaps this is the tale that finally answers it for me.
(Though, to be entirely honest, I’ve accepted that it is in many ways a question that cannot be decisively answered.)
There is a reason why self-discovery is often referred to as being ‘reborn’. That can often be what it feels like, after all. When across the hurdle of some profound self-discovery, you look back and may often find that you no longer relate to the person you were before this change. Your mind, in some ways, may no longer process that person as ‘you’. There are similarities, and you do still have the same face in the mirror, but in other ways you have truly become something beyond what you once were.
That is what I couldn’t keep out of my mind while reading Reboot. The protagonist, Wren, often refers to her past self as if she were a separate person, someone weaker and more shameful than she was. She resents when others scream because she hears her own in them, and no longer accepts that as part of herself. She has moved on, changed beyond recognition, and sees her past self as dead. Even if the process of becoming what she was didn’t involve her death, I imagine her perception of her former self would seldom change. She was ‘weak,’ and now she is ‘strong.’ Yet her fear of being her former self is proof that she never changed, as that is the last echoes of a weakness she tried so hard to kill.
In the world of Reboot, a dystopian society rose from the ashes of the old after a deadly virus swept through mankind. The virus killed many, though for those who managed to keep it in their system for long enough, an odd side effect would rarely make itself apparent. If you died while infected, even if your death occurred from something unrelated to the illness, there was a chance that your body would ‘reboot’, and you would rise from the dead. Yet what takes an otherwise joyful outcome and sours it is the fact that you are no longer the same person you were upon your death after you rise again. Your memories of your past life begin to become less clear, your ability to feel emotions is stifled, and your physical capabilities are amplified. The longer you were dead before you rose, the stronger (and less human) you were.
To the survivors, these ‘Reboots’ were monsters. They were a scourge that could only be allowed to exist if they were properly subjugated and made useful. They were fitted with trackers under their skin, put through rigorous and brutal training, and groomed into being obedient and mindless soldiers, willing to do whatever those in command wished of them. Disobedience meant immediate termination, and the human survivors living in the post-apocalyptic cities were kept under tight control by the Reboot soldiers.
Wren was dead for 178 minutes before she rose again, the longest out of any of the reboots that she fought alongside. She was a powerful weapon, an efficient killer, and seen as completely unfeeling. When expectations are pushed onto someone for long enough, they often begin to believe it themselves, and so Wren became exactly as those around her saw her. She obeyed every command, was ruthless with her targets, and shed any illusion of humanity she could have ever seen upon herself.
And yet, the world she had built up around herself began to crumble eventually. It began with her friend, a much weaker Reboot named Ever. She was told time and time again that Ever was inferior to her, the system she lived in reinforcing the very idea. She had only been dead for around an hour, which was barely anything when compared to being dead for almost three. Ever was not useful to Wren. Thus, she had no reason to care for her, and yet she did. She found herself caring for Ever, taking pride in her achievements, and feeling distinct despair when her health began to deteriorate due to the tests being performed on her by their ‘human’ masters.
Things began to crumble further when she found herself training one of the weakest reboots yet, a young man named Callum who had only been dead for around twenty minutes. Callum was very much still human, physically weak and filled with emotions that Wren saw as dragging him down. Yet he had a rebellious spirit, and found himself refusing the cruel orders given to him by his commanders. Wren had been tasked to kill hundreds of people, perhaps many of them innocent. Callum refused to kill even one.
And so, Wren had to kill him.
When I mentioned rebirth being a theme present in this story, of course on some levels I was referring to her death and subsequent ‘rebooting’. But really, her true rebirth was in the moment she decided that she wouldn’t kill Callum. She realized that she was only as inhuman as she forced herself to be, and turned her back on a system that had only valued her the same as a soldier values a gun. When she chose uncertain freedom over familiar control, that is when she truly ‘rebooted’.
McKee’s idea of a narrative being built from positive and negative charges puts the narrative into new perspectives. The beginning of the story is negatively charged, the cult-like brainwashing of the Reboot center pulling Wren further and further into the controlling idea – which is, funnily enough, control itself. She is convinced that there is no life for her outside of what has been laid out. She sees herself as not human: she is a weapon, and it is better for the world at large for her to remain in her cage to be used until her use expires. She does not desire freedom because she does not allow herself to. She is self-indoctrinating herself in every moment, drawing further and further into this illusion of ‘belonging’ where she is.
Her past self, her human self – she was free, but she was weak. Wren implies through her internal narration that she was once far more emotional, allowing herself to feel hurt and abused by the situation and people around her, but that she purposefully abandoned those feelings. Her arc in the beginning is a result of off-screen negative character development over years of grooming and denial. She sees the weaker reboots used as lab rats or dying pointlessly on unfair missions and she knows, even from the start, that it is wrong. Yet she does not allow herself to think about it any further. It is easier for her to accept her situation than to truly acknowledge what it is.
The positive charges of the narrative come in when her carefully-constructed walls begin to slip. She begins to feel emotions she hadn’t felt since before her rebooting, such as pride at Ever’s progress, sympathy for the weaker reboots, or even her growing romantic feelings for Callum. She realizes that she is not the mindless weapon she taught herself to be, and though the cage around her is gilded (as she is so highly regarded amongst the reboots) it is a cage nonetheless. Her wardens are just as content to put her down as they would anyone else the moment she stops being of use to them.
And yet it is the dread of realizing her situation that is the biggest positive charge. It is what propels her forward, what finally gives her the motivation she needs to surge forward and take the chance to be free. She is given one final test of her loyalty and obedience, of her attachment to the ideas that control her life, and she makes the leap of faith to deny the strings that puppeteer her life. She cuts the tracker out of her arm and cuts herself free.
Her path after that is not an easy one, and though she often questions if she made the right choice, deep down both she and the reader both know that it was. She had never ‘lost’ her humanity to begin with, it was stolen from her. Now it was time to get it back. The government, the reboot facilities, the structure of the broken society – that all represents rigid control. With her breakthrough, Wren and Callum now represent freedom in the narrative’s symbolic code. These ideas counteract one another and meet in conflict to create the latter act of the story.
And it is a conflict that is so deeply familiar to us all. Really, one could argue that everyone knows that freedom is better than control, so it was never a debate of which side was right to begin with. However, the struggle between freedom and control lies instead in the courage it takes to choose the former over the latter. Freedom is what most people want, but not what people are often brave enough to choose. Control is safer, less risky, even if it has far fewer rewards.
Therein lies the proairetic code of Reboot, one of the many codes outlined by Silverman in The Subject of Semiotics. From the beginning, we know that Wren is going to break free from the Reboot facility and save Callum. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have much of a story, would we? At least, not one fitting for the genre. Instead, it is the sequence of events that draws us along. Though we know the destination, the journey itself is a mystery. Not just how will Wren escape, will she come to the realization that she even wants to escape at all? What events will fall into place to help her realize the value of her own humanity?
These events are small, but quickly begin to add up. As readers, we see her begin to feel more freely again with Ever and Callum, finding herself unable to fit in with the other high-number reboots that she used to spend time with. Then, we see her start to acknowledge the injustices of the facility. Ever and many of the other low-number reboots are experimented on, endangering them and the others as well. She watches as the staff don’t move an inch as a feral reboot mauls their peers, but the second a guard is the one in danger, the entire room is filled with raining bullets that take down even several innocent reboots. She watches Ever rampage against her captors just to be put down like an animal, before being told she’ll have to kill the one person left in the facility she truly cares about – Callum.
These events are what push Wren along to her eventual ‘rebirth’, as we see her programming from years of reboot training slowly become undone. She is broken out of the illusion that this is the life she is meant to live and begins to move forward.
And so the hermeneutic code is not within what Wren will do next, but simply in the why. The Wren we meet in the beginning of the story would not have hesitated to kill Callum nor have batted an eye at Ever’s death. We as readers turn each page to see what happens inside of Wren that slowly but surely draws out her humanity and brings her to the side of doing what’s right. That is the truth we seek as we read.
This also closely ties in with the semic code. Characters that Wren meets and the experiences she endures are all pieces to the symbolic puzzle. Ever and the other low-number reboots that are so easily discarded are the casualties and sacrifices that she sees, facing her with the question of ‘how much is too much? What more will it take to change your mind? How many more must suffer before you realize how wrong this all is?’ Like straws laid upon the camel’s back, these sacrifices add up and push Wren closer and closer to her breaking point. We feel the weight on her shoulders as she finds herself hurtling towards an outcome she has been dreading from the moment she could feel it, and each loss contributes to that weight.
In “A Rhetoric of Reading,” James Seitz proposes that reading is less about passive consumption and more like a conversation between the text and the reader. He writes that “writing is always in some sense provisional, always in need of reading; and my point is that reading requires a rhetorical positioning similar to that assumed in conversation” (143). Just as in a conversation, one brings their own biases, which in turn affects their willingness to truly listen to what the text has to say. To properly consume a piece of writing, one must to an extent submit to it, becoming the kind of reader the author envisioned.
Though I am a defender of Young Adult fiction, even I find myself trapped in the common pitfalls of considering novels of that genre to be ‘shallow’ when compared to others. It is a cultural norm amongst readers that YA is a genre that isn’t worth much, one that even I struggle to shake. This made it difficult for me to approach this book with an intellectual lens. It felt ill-fitting to take these scholarly works of analytical advice (our various readings) and try to apply them to a YA story, like I was a child forcing a triangle block through a circular gap. And yet it was the task before me, so I had to make it work. I dug deep and tried to remind myself that no genre is inherently ‘weaker’ than any other.
Perhaps I was just lucky that Reboot has many subtle themes worth analyzing, or perhaps it is so that nearly all pieces of writing have something worthwhile within them. As an accepting reader, I was able to overcome the biases I had unintentionally collected, and was reminded of why I was so willing to defend YA when many others were not. These are stories written simpler than others, meant to be easily consumed by “actual” teenage audiences, but they bear a sense of confidence that other genres aimed at certain age groups often cannot have. A teenager may not have the attention span for long philosophical rants within a story, but they have the maturity and critical thinking to handle deeper themes and moral questions with no clear answer. Sure, there are many YA books that are cheap attempts at making money by abusing certain tropes, but there are also stories within the genre that are really worth digging into and thinking about.
In “Truth in Fiction: A Reexamination of Audiences,” Peter Rabinowitz argues that “there are two readers distinguishable in every literary experience. First, there is the ‘real’ individual upon whose crossed knee rests the open volume, and whose personality is as complex and ultimately inexpressible as any dead poet’s. Second, there is the fictitious reader – I shall call him the ‘mock reader’ whose mask and costume the individual takes on in order to experience the language” (Rabinowitz, 93). This is referring to the idea of taking on a different facade in order to properly enjoy a book, just as I did when I read Reboot without any of my preconceived perceptions about the merit of Young Adult novels.
I believe that even if I hadn’t had these biases at the beginning of my reading, I still would have found value in assuming a different position as a reader. After all, this was a story meant to connect with a teenage audience (who may still be preoccupied with troubles adults see as juvenile), so while it hasn’t been long at all since I was a teen (I’m only twenty, after all!) I still had to step back into that mindset. I had to ask myself; what are the controlling values that define the life of a teenage reader?
When Wren would muse about relationships and whether or not she was in love with Callum, I definitely wanted to roll my eyes a bit, but I knew there was no point in that. This was a struggle that was laughable to me as an adult, but I had to remember what it was like to be sixteen and feeling like every passing chance at a relationship was a make-or-break decision that could truly affect my life. To a younger audience, the audience intended by the author, whether Wren and Callum get together is just as important of a question as whether or not they’ll break free from the Reboot facility. The narrative audience holds onto every moment of their bond, and sees every outcome where they don’t escape together as just as disastrous as neither of them escaping at all, which adds to the tension in the climax as Wren struggles to save Callum from his fate.
This intended audience of younger readers is one of the biggest reasons why YA is so often dismissed, and yet it is likely the most unfair of reasons. Just because a story is meant to appeal to a teenage audience does not strip it of it’s value, it simply re-frames it to appeal more to those it is meant to connect with. We as adults were all teenagers once, and I believe we should be a bit more fair to our younger selves. We were never shallow or unintelligent for liking stories that were made for us to enjoy.
Reflections…
Going through my freshman year of college, I felt like I understood roughly what to expect. By Sophomore year, I knew that college was different than highschool (something that still holds very true) and that while there can be a lot of variance between classes based on who the professor is, you can at least maintain a rough idea of what your classes will require of you. I still feel like most of the time, that latter assumption will be accurate.
This class was different.
Going into How Writers Read, I was immediately struck by how different it felt when compared to other classes I had been taking. The methods used and assignments given all felt very foreign to me. Writing is my passion, one of the skills I pride myself on, and yet I truly felt helpless at times in this class. I found myself truly wondering many times whether I was going to be good enough for this class, or if I just wasn’t cut out for it.
And yet, I kept pushing forward. I find myself standing at the end still with many questions about what it means to truly read something, let alone how that connects to my writing, but I wonder if these are questions that I’m even meant to know the answers to just yet. Perhaps these are the questions that are meant to stick with me throughout my writing career, eternally inching closer to the answer of what it means to be an author.
Perhaps, there are no answers. Or there are only answers that change depending on the person asking them. I can’t tell you which it’s going to be, because I’ve hardly even begun my journey yet.
Though if I ever find it, I’ll try to remember to let you know.
Works Cited
McKee, Robert. “Structure and Meaning.” Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting. New York: Regan, 1997
Rabinowitz, Peter. “Truth In Fiction: A Reexamination of Audiences.” Critical Inquiry. 4.1 (1977)
Seitz, James E. “A Rhetoric of Reading.” Rebirth of Rhetoric: Essays in Language, Culture, and Education. London: Routledge, 1992.
Silverman, Kaja. The Subject of Semiotics. New York: Oxford UP, 1983.
Tintera, Amy. Reboot. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2013
Blog Posts:
Reboot – Blog 1, Blog 2, Blog 3, Blog 4
My Blogs – Night, Supermarket, Reboot, Haunting of Hill House
Read the Room 