Hate List

Valerie’s sketchbook, which she refers to as her“reality,” is where she offers, via art, her perspective on those around her. Valerie stops assuming she knows what people think about her and starts drawing her classmates and teachers with keen observation and eye toward a more objective outlook. She notices how, even though her classmates mostly seem like packs of wolves, one former enemy, Jessica Campbell, seems largely harmless now. Valerie gains empathy for her classmates and teachers when she sees the confused and sad expressions on their faces. The sketchbook, then, symbolizes the reality that Valerie has more to offer the world than hate; she possesses skill, creativity, and insight.

The horses on Valerie’s wallpaper symbolize her rising and falling moodsas she travels the path to self-recovery; when Valerie is doing well, this positivity is matched by the horses; on the other hand, when Valerie is experiencing depression or anxiety, the horses are of little use. To escape her troubles, Valerie imagines “just riding, riding, riding, my hair swimming out behind me, my horse never getting tired or hungry, never finding another soul on earth. Just open possibility ahead of me into eternity” (11). This feeling of total freedom, both from bullies and her parents’ bickering, is intoxicating, but unrealistic. When she turns to the horses for help on the first day back, she notices that they“just looked like crappy kid’s wallpaper art” (12).Ultimately, Valerie realizes that the horses are “as they’d always been, of course—completely motionless” (405). 

Nick’s grave symbolizes how different characters choose to mourn for Nick. To Duce, Valerie’s failure to visit Nick’s grave is a sore point; he equates sitting at Nick’s grave with caring about Nick, so he goes there everyday. For Duce, being close to Nick’s grave is being close to Nick. For Valerie, she feels just the opposite. With so much of her recovery revolving around letting go of Nick, his presence remains too real; he still feels alive to her.

Valerie’s visit to Nick’s grave symbolizes her acceptance of his death; she forgives herself for having missed the warning signs. As she says her final goodbye, she reads his headstone, which says he was a beloved son. She notes that “[t]he words in the granite said nothing about [Valerie] at all,” signifying how she has freed herself from Nick’s actions (351).

Shakespeare’s Hamlet is Nick’s favorite play; on a visit to Nick’s house, before they start officially dating, Valerie notices Nick’s extensive library, particularly his collection of Shakespeare’s tragedies. Nick waits for her reaction, seemingly afraid she will negatively judge his treasured books. She opens Hamlet when he says it is his favorite, reads a passage, and Nick surprisingly and prophetically finishes the passage. It is a speech by Claudius, Hamlet’s stepfather, given after Hamlet kills Polonius: “Alas, how shall this bloody deed be answer’d?” (137). This impresses Valerie, and Nick continues to discuss how Hamlet’s fatal flaw is his failure to kill Claudius.

Although this happens quite early in their relationship, Valerie fails to see the significance of this moment until much later. Nick acts on their hate list and against their bullies: he answers the “bloody deed” just as the play does, with more bloodshed, more deaths, and more loss (137). This symbolizes Nick’s (and Hamlet’s) loss of humanity. Once the bright boy, readily interpreting Hamlet and other books, Nick devolves into a murderer, consumed by one misdeed after another, acting out one of his beloved tragedies instead of learning from it.

Throughout the novel, Nick and Valerie refer to themselves as the classic, doomed lovers Romeo and Juliet from William Shakespeare’s play. This first comes into play when Valerie flashes back to a day at Blue Lake, at a party after their sophomore year, where Nick asks her out the first time. He says to her, “Remember when we read Romeo and Juliet in freshman English last year? You think we could be like them?” (20). He references their suicide, for them to be together in death, but Valerie focuses on the obsessive love part; both suffer from the fantasy of all-consuming, dark love. Like Romeo and Juliet, Valerie’s parents oppose their relationship. Further, Nick often mentions suicide, and the two see themselves as the world being against them. Instead of signaling alarm, Valerie agrees to be Nick’s girlfriend, often calling him “Romeo”;indeed, when she says goodbye to Nick at his grave, Valerie says, “Goodbye, Romeo” (151).