84 pages • 2 hours read
The Darkest Minds
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Symbols & Motifs
Camps
The Psi internment camps are key to the dystopian setting and plot, but they also play a symbolic role, evoking real-life internment and concentration camps in history, specifically internment camps instituted by the U.S. government for Japanese Americans during the Second World War, the Nazi concentration camps in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as migrant and detention camps in other settings.
As was the case in these camps, inmates in the Psi camps are targeted for being different and for potentially being a political threat. They are under constant surveillance, are not free to leave, and are forced to work. They are threatened regularly with violence. Personal dignity is not prioritized. Zu alludes to having her head shaved for lice, a common practice in Nazi camps. As was the case with these real-life camps, those on the outside either remain unaware or apathetic to the scale of the atrocities being perpetrated. This historical connection gives Bracken’s depiction of the persecution of young Psi people more plausibility and realism. It also encourages the reader to look for real-world thematic parallels.
Monsters/Darkest Minds
The word that Ruby uses most consistently in reference to her Orange abilities is “monster,” by which she seems to mean a creature that preys upon others and that lurks in secret, unknown to everyone else. This motif appears again and again as a way of underscoring how fearful Ruby is of not being able to have control over her own nature. She believes that although external foes seem more threatening, she is the biggest threat to her friends’ safety, in part because no one knows that she is so dangerous.
Late in the novel, Chubs adds a related image to this motif, which is used in the book’s title. Chubs observes that although Clancy seemed like an admirable leader on the surface, he was actually selfish and power-hungry: “There are some people like that, you know? The darkest minds tend to hide behind the most unlikely faces” (456). Chubs’s view of people with the “darkest minds” is a riff and variation on Ruby’s idea of monsters: hidden threats.
Watership Down
Watership Down, by Richard Adams, is a 1972 allegorical novel about a small group of rabbits who undertake a dangerous journey to search for a new home. Bracken builds a series of allusions to the novel in The Darkest Minds as a motif. In Chapter 11, Ruby notices Chubs reading the book, and upon picking it up later, she remembers it as one of her favorites from childhood. In Chubs’s copy she rereads a passage: “All the world will be your enemy […] Be cunning and full of tricks and your people will never be destroyed” (184). This story about vulnerable rabbits who want a home in a hostile society underscores Ruby’s and Chubs’s own plight and their feelings of vulnerability. When Ruby wonders if Chubs knows how the novel ends (the rabbits do get a home, but the main character who has led them dies) she is expressing anxiety about their own futures and perhaps about Liam’s fate.
Later, Ruby remembers a particular line from Watership Down that will come back to her several times in the text: “Rabbits need dignity and, above all, the will to accept their fate” (307). In Watership Down, this line encourages the rabbit characters to face what happens to them in a passive way, accepting bad fortune or even death, as that offers them more dignity. Ruby doesn’t think that she, Liam, Chubs and Zu can take on this passive attitude, constantly being “hunted and chased down to every dark pocket of earth we tried to hide inside” (307). She thinks of the line again at other times in the novel when the characters are especially at the mercy of forces beyond their control. This motif is a way of highlighting Ruby’s awareness of their powerlessness as young people in this dystopian society and emphasizing her refusal to accept it. It also underlines how crucial it is to have the ability to find a safe home and community of your own.
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