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Chapters 5–8

Summary: Chapter 5: Violet: 153 days till graduation

Violet goes to Amanda Monk’s house, surprised to find a party in full swing. She passes Joe Wyatt, Roamer, and Troy Satterfield on her way to finding Amanda and Suze Haines in the basement. They ask about the incident on the ledge. She tells them she was glad she was there. Roamer asks her why she was on the ledge. Violet says that she saw Finch and followed him. 

Feeling sick, Violet leaves the party. She texts an apology to Amanda and runs into Ryan Cross. He picks her up, twirls her, and tries to kiss her, but she turns away. She remembers their first kiss. She tells him she’s sick and has to go home.

In her bedroom, Violet marks her calendar with a black X to cross off the day. Violet loves her room because it is here that she can be whatever she wants to be. Lately, she’s been doing a lot of reading, mostly the Brontë sisters.

Violet discovers a video Finch has posted on her Facebook wall, clearly addressed to her. In it, he sings a song about a boy jumping from a roof. At the end of the song, he looks into the camera at Violet: “Violet Markey, if you’re watching this, you must still be alive. Please confirm.” Yesterday, Violet thinks, must be a bad dream. She private messages Finch, demanding he remove the video. Violet makes Finch promise that if he comes over tonight he will “drop it once and for all?” Finch agrees, but before Violet can take it back, Finch has logged off.

Summary: Chapter 6: Finch: Day 7 of the Awake

As Finch drives the Little Bastard, his mom’s car, to Violet’s house, he recalls the poetry of Cesare Pavese. He speeds up, his car lands half-way in a ditch, and he’s still alive. 

Finch finds Violet sitting on her front step. She says she’s fine and doesn’t need to talk. They take a walk, and Finch brings up the incident on the ledge. Violet insists she’s not suicidal. That day on the ledge would have been her sisters nineteenth birthday. Violet confesses that nothing much matters anymore. “It’s all just time filler until we die.” Finch points out that Violet didn’t jump. Something must matter. 

Violet asks Finch why people call him Theodore Freak. He hesitates to answer as he decides which version of the truth to tell.

Back at Violet’s house, she tells Finch she wants to go to sleep. He thinks to himself, “I wouldn’t ever sleep if I didn’t have to.” Then Violet reveals that she picked the lock that day at the tower. Finch whistles, telling her “There’s more to you than meets the eye.” 

On his nightly run, Finch takes a different route home, over the A Street Bridge. He sees the hole in the guardrail and the cross beside it. He climbs down the embankment where he finds remnants of Eleanor’s car. He takes the license plate with him. “This time, I will stay awake,” he thinks. He runs home.

Summary: Chapter 7: Violet: 152 days till graduation

Violet has received a notice from the web hosting company that her domain name, EleanorandViolet.com, is about to expire. She sorts through the folders of notes and ideas she and Eleanor had been working on and briefly considers turning the site into one for writers. But then she deletes the notes and the hosting company email and empties the trash on her computer. The email is gone forever, just like Eleanor.

Summary: Chapter 8: Finch: Day 8 of the Awake

Sunday evening Finch, his older sister Kate, and his younger sister Decca attend the Weekly Obligatory Family Dinner at the home their father, Ted, a former professional hockey player, shares with his second wife Rosemarie, and her son Josh Raymond. Thanks to Kate, Finch’s dad thinks that Finch has been at a six-week study-away program and has no idea about his troubles at school. 

During dinner, Finch goads his dad, with whom he has a troubled relationship, by telling him that he doesn’t eat red meat. “80’s Finch” explains it in terms of different ways to die: you can either jump off a roof or poison yourself with meat. 
Back home, Kate bemoans how stupid it all is: Sunday dinners, pretending like everything’s fine with their screwed up lives. Finch asks her what she knows about Eleanor Markey.

In his bedroom, Finch stubs out the cigarette he’s grabbed, breaks the others in half, and throws them away. On his computer, he writes about suicide by poison, and then finds sleeping pills in his medicine cabinet and lines them up on his desk. 

On Violet’s Facebook page, someone has posted about how she was a hero for saving him. Finch sends a private message to Violet, quoting Virginia Woolf. While waiting for a reply, he adds notes to the wall of his room, where he tracks his thoughts. Eventually, Violet responds, and they exchange Woolf quotes. Then Violet sends Finch her rules for the class project: no driving, no travel in bad weather. They agree to write about their wandering. 

Finch flushes the sleeping pills down the toilet and finally falls asleep, into a nightmare on the ledge.

Analysis: Chapters 5–8

Violet attempts to keep up appearances when she decides to go to Amanda’s house, but her difficulty in adapting to the unexpected scene illustrates how deeply troubled she is. The mental exertion of engaging in routine social activities with a longstanding group of friends renders her physically ill. Just as she was in geography class, Violet is the center of attention, but she does not relish the role. In pushing away the unwanted attention, she continues to dismantle the expectations of the popular girl label.

Finch connects with Violet over their shared struggles with mental illness. When he shares the video of him singing the song, it is an attempt to remind Violet that he understands her in ways others don’t. He also tries to show that he cares about her well-being. Because Violet notices this attempt, she opens up about what led her to the ledge. She also exhibits bravery when she asks Finch about being called a freak, and when she admits to him that in order to get to the ledge she picked the lock. This admission is a stark challenge to Finch’s perception of Violet as a rule-follower. This admission is also one of the first times that Violet opens up to anyone about how she really feels about her struggles. In picking the lock to the bell tower, Violet opens the door to the possibility of other departures from her normal behavior, and it is Finch’s outreach that prompts her to do so. 

Both main characters deal with the remnants of Violet’s past in diverse ways, showing how they think differently about grief and death. Just as he and Violet leave objects at the sites they visit, Finch takes the license plate from her sister’s accident site as a physical reminder. When Violet deletes all of the virtual traces of her relationship with Eleanor, she attempts to put her grief out of sight and mind. Her brief inclination to turn her website into a resource for writers foreshadows her efforts to do just that later in the book. Violet compounds the act of letting go of Eleanor when she deletes their shared notes and empties the trash, so that she is not tempted to revamp the site. Just as Finch vows to stay Awake, Violet succumbs to her earlier assertion that nothing matters. 

Family dinner at Finch’s dad’s new house reveals disparities between his relationship with his father and his mother. Kate’s subterfuge regarding Finch’s absence from school illustrates that though their parents are different, they are both easy to fool, and that Finch’s support system is limited. Refusing to eat the meat his father cooked is a tacit insult to his father’s role as a provider, and an act purposefully committed in a show of teenage rebellion. Ted Finch goes to great pains to keep up appearances, but Finch cannot resist exposing his father for the cruel person he knows him to be. After Finch decides to forgo the “poison” that is red meat, he destroys his cigarettes, indicating that he would like to move on from the poisonous nature of his current mood. He then inventories his stash of sleeping pills, a dark omen underscoring how he feels about death, but ultimately destroys them as well, perhaps in an effort to detox from his precarious mental state.

Finch and Violet’s online exchange of Virginia Woolf quotes is a vehicle for deepening their connection. Along with their Facebook interactions, using quotations adds another layer of safety to their communication which eventually gives them the courage to use their own words. While Violet and Finch don’t discuss Woolf’s well-documented struggles with mental health or her suicide, the fact that they both grapple with their own emotional well-being allows Woolf’s struggles to go unmentioned yet understood. Violet resonates with Woolf’s work so much because Woolf’s words mirror how she feels about herself. When Violet agrees to write about their wandering experience together it is the first time that she considers the possibility of inviting words back into her life, and suggests that writing will continue to play an important role in her recovery.

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