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18. Thursday: Campbell
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in My Sister’s Keeper, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Bodily Autonomy
Siblinghood
Parenthood
Control
Illness and Isolation
Summary
Analysis
Jesse arrives home to find Julia, whom he immediately develops a crush on. She explains that she’s Anna’s guardian ad litem and asks if he knows where Anna is, but he doesn’t know. He invites her up to his room and unsuccessfully flirts with her for a while. Eventually, Julia asks him what it was like growing up in his family. He tells her how, one Christmas Eve when Kate was in the hospital, he went out to cut down a spruce from a neighbor’s yard and set it up. When his parents got home, they gave him a gift from the hospital gift shop and didn’t say anything about the tree. Julia asks if Anna was similarly neglected; Jesse says no, since she’s useful. She then asks how their parents decide when to use Anna for medical purposes, and Jesse suggests that it isn’t a choice.
Jesse’s initial flirtation with Julia is an emotional shield for him. Rather than genuinely engaging with her and talking about his difficult situation, he falls back on juvenile pickup lines, following the pattern of him using delinquency as a defense mechanism. Thus, it is to Julia’s credit that she is able to get through to him. Jesse’s anecdote about Christmas illustrates the stark discrepancy between how much Jesse tried to impress his parents and how little attention they gave him in return. With this in mind, it is unsurprising that Jesse has given up trying to win their approval.
Themes
In a flashback to when he was seven, Jesse decides to try to dig a hole all the way to China. Every night for four weeks, he goes out to work on it until he’s dug a tunnel so deep that he gets lost in it, since he’s unable to light his own way through it. Stuck in the ground, he cries out for help until Brian comes and pulls him out, chastising him for endangering himself in a hole that could’ve collapsed on him. Jesse looks down and realizes that the hole isn’t deep at all; Brian can stand in it and it only comes up to his chest. Jesse ponders how “darkness […] is relative.”
Jesse’s flashback and his subsequent musing about how darkness is relative is a nod to how difficult it can be to ascertain one’s own circumstances when they’re in the middle of it. In Jesse’s case, his situation was both better and worse than he realized; he didn’t consider that the hole could have collapsed on him, but it also wasn’t as deep as it felt. In this, his experience serves as a metaphor for enduring trauma.
Themes
