Chapter 16 'Yes & No': Summary and Analysis

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This guide contains detailed spoilers for the entire novel. Proceed only if you've finished reading or are comfortable knowing the plot.

Summary

Chapter 16, “Yes & No,” is a compact lyric poem that moves through a series of paired assertions about safety, solitude, and fear. The poem opens with the claim that driving alone at night with music is safe, noting that no stars are visible in the sky, though a blood orange moon and Mars appear. The speaker then asserts that lying alone in bed is also safe.

The poem shifts to practical advice: keep your hands clean, and you may touch your own face. Keep the windows shut, with no opening for spirits—listing influenza, the evil eye, miasma, killer bees, stray bullets, and fleas as the threats that might enter.

The poem then declares that everything comes back normal, and introduces the image of the aster, which exists entirely in mental space. It closes with exclamations about the sublimity of the moon and of mossy ruins, followed by a final reference to “the fear and the fear itself.”

Key Events

Since this is a lyric poem rather than a narrative, the “events” are the poem’s sequence of images and assertions:

The speaker declares driving alone at night with music safe, with no visible stars but a blood orange moon and Mars.
The speaker declares lying alone in bed safe.
The poem offers instructions: keep hands clean, and touching one’s own face is permitted.
Windows must remain shut against a catalog of threats: influenza, evil eye, miasma, killer bee, stray bullet, flea.
The poem asserts that everything returns to normal.
The aster is presented as an image existing entirely in mental space.
The poem exclaims at the sublimity of the moon and of mossy ruins.
The poem ends with a reference to fear and fear itself.

Character Development

The chapter has no named characters. The only presence is the speaker, whose stance develops across the poem’s brief span. The speaker begins by establishing a series of safety claims—driving alone, lying in bed alone—that suggest a person managing anxiety through ritual and reassurance. The middle section, with its instructions about hands and windows, reads like a self-soothing checklist against invisible threats. By the end, the speaker’s tone shifts from practical reassurance to exclamation at the sublime, suggesting a movement from managing fear to confronting it directly. The final line, “the fear and the fear itself,” implies a distinction between fear as an emotion and fear as an object of contemplation—a duality that echoes the chapter’s title.

Themes, Symbols, or Motifs

Safety and Solitude. The poem repeatedly pairs solitude with safety: driving alone, lying in bed alone. Solitude is presented not as danger but as a condition that can be made safe through attention and ritual.

Protection and Cleanliness. Clean hands and shut windows form a protective barrier against threats. The poem’s advice is practical and domestic, suggesting that safety is maintained through small, repeatable actions.

Catalog of Threats. The list of threats—influenza, evil eye, miasma, killer bee, stray bullet, flea—mixes the medical, the supernatural, and the absurd. This catalog suggests that fear is not rational; it attaches to whatever is available, from disease to folklore to random violence.

The Sublime and the Mundane. The poem juxtaposes the sublime (the moon, mossy ruins) with the mundane (driving, lying in bed, washing hands). This juxtaposition suggests that the extraordinary and the ordinary coexist, and that the sublime can be encountered within everyday life.

Mental Space. The aster exists “all in mental space,” suggesting that some images are purely internal—products of imagination rather than physical reality. This line raises questions about what is real and what is constructed in the mind.

Duality. The title “Yes & No” frames the poem’s dualistic structure: safe and unsafe, open and shut, fear and fear itself. The poem holds opposing ideas in tension rather than resolving them.

Fear and Fear Itself. The final line distinguishes between fear and “the fear itself,” echoing the famous formulation about fear being the thing to fear. This suggests that the speaker’s anxiety is not about specific threats but about fear as a self-perpetuating state.

Why This Chapter Matters

“Yes & No” is a concentrated expression of the book’s central concerns: the management of fear, the search for safety, and the coexistence of the mundane and the sublime. In a short space, the poem moves from practical reassurance to cosmic exclamation, modeling a way of living with anxiety—acknowledging threats, taking protective measures, and still finding moments of sublimity. The chapter’s title, with its affirmation and negation, captures the book’s habit of holding contradictory ideas together. The poem also demonstrates Gabbert’s interest in the lyric as a form for philosophical inquiry, using the poem’s brevity to compress complex ideas about fear, safety, and perception into a few lines.

Study Questions and Answers

1. How does the poem’s structure of paired assertions reinforce the title “Yes & No”?

The poem is built on paired and contradictory claims. Driving alone at night is safe; lying in bed alone is safe. Hands must be kept clean, but touching one’s own face is allowed. Windows must be shut, yet the poem lists threats that might enter if they were open. The title “Yes & No” captures this structure: each assertion is a “yes” to safety and a “no” to threat, but the poem also holds both in tension—fear and safety coexist, the sublime and the mundane coexist. The final line, “the fear and the fear itself,” is the most explicit duality, distinguishing between the emotion and the thing that provokes it.

2. What is the significance of the aster being “all in mental space”?

The aster is a flower, but the poem says its image exists entirely in mental space—that is, it is not a physical flower but a mental construct. This line suggests that some of the poem’s images are not meant to be taken as literal descriptions but as products of the mind. It also raises a question about the other images in the poem: if the aster is mental, are the moon, the ruins, and even the threats also mental? The line points to the poem’s interest in perception and the constructed nature of experience, suggesting that fear itself may be a mental image rather than a physical reality.

3. How does the final line “The fear and the fear itself” transform the poem’s earlier claims of safety?

The poem opens with a series of safety claims—driving is safe, lying in bed is safe, keep hands clean, keep windows shut. These claims suggest that fear can be managed through action and ritual. But the final line introduces a distinction between fear and “the fear itself,” suggesting that the emotion of fear is separate from whatever causes it. This distinction implies that even if all the threats are kept out—even if the windows are shut and the hands are clean—fear itself remains. The poem thus moves from a practical approach to fear to a more philosophical one, acknowledging that fear is not eliminated by safety measures but persists as a state of mind.