Little Brother

Little Brother, titled after George Orwell’s 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, a dystopian cautionary tale in which the ruling Party, headed by Big Brother, spies on its citizens through telescreens and enforces rigid control over anti-party sentiment. Marcus, the protagonist of the novel, goes by the screen name w1n5t0n, a reference to Winston Smith, the protagonist of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Marcus narrates the story through a first-person limited perspective, and his voice in the first chapter establishes him as a rebellious teen; he is arrogant and condescending to adults who do not have his facility in technology and contemptuous of the school surveillance systems. His description of Fred Benson, the vice-principal at Cesar Chavez High School, as “clueless,” “a jailer,” and “a sucking chest wound of a human being” (9) displays typical teenaged rebellion against a school administrator, but his workarounds of every security system in the school demonstrate a deeper defiance of adult authority, characterizing him as a social engineer who alters the outcomes of school security measures to benefit himself. Marcus prides himself on being smarter than most adults and initially argues with the DHS’s interrogator, Carrie, whom he calls “severe haircut lady” (48), but his subsequent experiences at the hands of the DHS break down his hubris. His degradation while imprisoned drives his motivation for revenge and sets in motion the story arc.

Doctorow sets the novel in San Francisco; the liberal nature of the city is an appropriate setting for the activists who protest the draconian surveillance tactics of the DHS following the bombing. Doctorow establishes the conflict between civil rights and security initially in Marcus’s school setting; he states that he is “one of the most surveilled people in the world,” an assertion that is backed up by mentions of the school’s gait recognition software, RFID tracking, “minder-tracers” on his phone, and school laptops that track every keystroke (13). In an example of situational irony, his high school, which employs invasive security measures that violate students’ right to privacy, is named after Cesar Chavez, a civil rights activist from the 1960s. Although most of the technology such as RFIDs, email, and online gaming is now commonplace, the way in which this technology is used places the novel in the science fiction genre. At the time of Little Brother’s publication, gait recognition software and RFID tracking were not available technologies, although they are in use now. Doctorow’s vision of a world where the DHS spies on American citizens using technology is close enough to the United States following the 9/11 bombing to be chillingly believable. When terrorists bomb the Bay Bridge, Marcus sees speakers that he’s never noticed before, displaying a general complacency of the public to ignore surveillance systems that become part of the public landscape. Doctorow also addresses issues of technological privacy and ethics that are prevalent in current debates; for instance, Marcus uses technology unethically when he steals George’s phone number and employs botnets to crash his phone, and the DHS unethically coerces Marcus, a minor, to disclose his passwords so they can mine his online information for clues about the bombing; this introduces the theme of Privacy and Safety in Times of War or Crisis.

In this section, Doctorow juxtaposes the tourist sections of San Francisco—family restaurants, Victorian houses, and cable cars—to the Tenderloin, which has a reputation as a high-crime neighborhood marked by violence and substance use. This comparison ties into the two bridges as well; the Golden Gate Bridge is an iconic landmark in San Francisco, but it serves little purpose for the residents. The terrorists bomb the Oakland Bay Bridge, which Marcus describes as the workhorse bridge. The Bay Bridge connects the city to the suburbs, where “a normal person can afford a house” (72). These contrasts between the image that most people have of San Francisco and the real city demonstrate a motif of the discrepancy between reality and perception; throughout the novel, characters strive to differentiate between the image that the government and press portray and the reality that they see daily.

In one of the more graphic scenes in the novel, Marcus witnesses a “middle-aged lady in a hippie dress” (36) fall before the crowd behind her in the BART station. Doctorow notes that “the crowd’s pressure was too much” (36) and she disappeared beneath their feet. Marcus’s instinct is to help her, but the crowd also nearly knocks him down, and he steps on the lady as the crowd sweeps him forward. The woman’s style of dress is significant; hippies are representative of free thinking and free speech. The act of her falling before a panicked crowd displays the fall of free speech, symbolically, before the pressure of the fearful masses. Marcus’s initial reaction to save her foreshadows his attempt to protect free speech after the bombing, but he is swept away by fear, which informs his choice to remain anonymous. This scene introduces The Importance of Free Speech in Preserving Democracy.

The DHS, the antagonist in the story, uses interrogation techniques that mirror Fred Benson’s tactics to get Marcus to confess to subverting the school’s security system. Benson infers that he has information about Marcus’s covert online activity by invoking the nickname: w1n5t0n. However, Benson pronounces it wrong, and Marcus is convinced that the vice-principal’s lack of knowledge about the Internet would make it impossible for him to ferret out Marcus’s anti-surveillance intrigues. Marcus infuriates Benson with his denials and insistence that Benson call the police and his parents. However, when Marcus attempts the same defense against the DHS, telling them he wants to call his lawyer, he finds himself overmatched. The DHS uses classic interrogation techniques, wearing Marcus down by stripping him of his personal identity, keeping him isolated from friends and family, taking away his clothes and possessions, and clothing him in an orange prison jumpsuit. They take away all privacy, and their actions toward him are arbitrary and unpredictable. He is dependent on his captors for all basic rights, including using a bathroom. When he is brought in front of Carrie after wetting his pants, he feels “dirty and ashamed, and all those feelings of deserving what I got” (60) came back to him. By the end of his imprisonment, he gives up his rights to privacy on his devices and begs to sign away his freedom of speech as well. When the DHS strips away Marcus’s most basic rights, his higher-order rights like privacy and freedom of speech become superfluous. Additionally, the fear that DHS instills in Marcus is a motif that drives much of his actions and other character’s actions throughout the story.

Doctorow’s diction reflects the immediacy of communication between teens in the digital era and relies heavily on verbal and IM dialogue. Although the tone occasionally becomes didactic, especially when Marcus is describing technology, Doctorow overall employs an apprehensive tone through Marcus’s first-person perspective. The tone and prison setting create a tense mood, engaging the reader in Marcus’s frightening and humbling experiences with a hostile government agency against the backdrop of a terrorist attack.