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58. TTYL; First-Time Flyer FAQ
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Everything, Everything, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Coming of Age
Trust and Lies
Family, Abuse, and Bravery
The Value of Experience
Summary
Analysis
As he sits on a stationary baggage carousel, Olly announces that baggage carousels are a perfect metaphor for life. He says that when people are born, they become luggage and go around on the carousel. Some people are damaged by other luggage, some people get lost, and those that get picked up live boring lives in closets. Olly has been to Hawaii before and remembers Olly’s dad saying the airport could spend more on first impressions, but Maddy thinks that it’s not a bad sight. Maddy asks where Olly’s family members fall in his baggage carousel theory. He says Olly’s mom is damaged, he and Kara are lost, and his dad is the carousel. At this, Maddy tells Olly that his dad doesn’t get to have everything.
Olly’s insistence that his dad is the baggage carousel itself shows how little power he has in his family and indeed, over his life as a whole. He sees that his dad has an outsize amount of power to dictate the course of Olly’s life, whether that’s intimidating Olly nightly or forcing him to quit the mathletes. When Maddy insists that Olly shouldn’t give his dad so much credit, she encourages him to understand that he actually does have the power to change things—for instance, he could leave.
Themes
Embarrassed, Olly turns away and announces that Maddy needs a lei. He talks a greeter into giving him one for free and then puts it over Maddy’s head. Maddy thanks Olly in Hawaiian. He teases her about reading her entire guidebook, and Maddy says she’d adore her suitcase and everything it stood for if she had one. She realizes that Olly doesn’t buy into her optimism, but it’s intoxicating for him anyway. He makes her promise not to die. For the reader, Maddy defines promise as a lie that she wants to keep.
Through Maddy, Olly is able to see the world through new eyes. Her optimism far surpasses his own exactly because she hasn’t had as much experience in the real world, but this doesn’t mean that her optimism doesn’t still have an effect on him as he sees how happy and fulfilled she is by this experience of traveling with him.
Themes
