We Need To Talk About Kevin

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2003

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-9

Chapters 10-20

Chapters 21-28

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

The Ambivalence of Motherhood

Eva is not originally sure if she wants to be a mother. The role of a mother is to nurture, protect, feed, encourage, and love a child. When Kevin is born, he refuses to nurse, contrasted with Celia, who Eva describes as grateful when she begins suckling. Kevin’s birth puts Eva in the position of having child she does not love, who resists and defies any attempts at bonding or nurturing, and who is openly hostile toward her.

From the beginning, Eva associates Kevin with failure: “In the very instant of his birth, I associated Kevin with my own limitations–with not only suffering, but defeat” (89). She is determined to deliver him without an epidural, but then changes her mind only after the pain of the birth becomes too great. By then, it is too late, and she must both bear the pain of childbirth and bear the memory of going back on her word not to use drugs for the delivery. Immediately after his birth, Kevin rejects her by refusing her breast milk, gagging as if she repulses him. Regardless of his reaction, she still feels a sense of duty and continues to try to nurse him, although she never succeeds.

Even had Eva’s motherhood gone well, she still makes a point of reminding the reader that she sacrificed her former life to have children. Kevin and Celia make it hard for her to work the way she likes to. She cannot enjoy travel as she did formerly, which she makes clear on her trip to Africa. Kevin also pits her and Franklin against one another. Franklin is always the person Eva cannot imagine living without. Part of her torment is that she can remember her life before children, and it was better than her life with children.

Eva does not fit naturally into the role of motherhood. Her resentment of her children makes her feel guilty. She describes her experience in the hospital with Kevin as a time when she waited desperately for emotion to overwhelm her. Instead, she finds the entire experience mundane. Formerly, she had imagined motherhood as a country one can only visit through experience. Instead, Kevin’s birth shrinks her world to his needs and hostility and makes her painfully nostalgic for the freedom she had before him.

At the end of the novel, Eva admits she will have a room for Kevin in her apartment if he makes it out of prison. She even has a copy of the Robin Hood book he seemed to enjoy. For much of the story, she claims she resents being known primarily as the infamous Kevin’s mother. As the story concludes, she knows she is still his mother and that they are all the other has, for better or worse.

Violence and Depravity as Entertainment

In the documentary, Kevin divides the world into those who watch and those who are watched: watchers and watchees. Throughout the novel, Eva chronicles the horrific accumulation of school shootings, which appear so frequently they threaten to become routine. Kevin implies he left Eva alive so she could be part of the audience. One of Kevin’s issues with the “amateur” shooters is they occasionally show remorse and frequently show poor planning. It agitates Kevin that, given the public’s apparent appetite for lurid media, the audience is growing so large. He says the audience needs people like him or they would have nothing to watch.

In some way, Eva understands why cold, fame-seeking people like Kevin gravitate toward destructive acts rather than kindness an altruism. “In a country that doesn’t discriminate between fame and infamy, the latter presents itself as plainly more achievable” (181). Kevin knows he has an audience waiting for him as soon as he commits the massacre.

We Need to Talk About Kevin was published four years after the Columbine shooting, during a time when there were great efforts to spot behaviors in kids that could hint at a propensity for large-scale violence. Experts emphasized the music of Marilyn Manson and other nihilistic artists as possible influences.

However, Kevin goes to great lengths to show his massacre has no meaning. It cannot be used as part of anyone else’s crusade. Using a crossbow sets him apart from other shooters and also means he can’t be used as a symbol for gun control campaigns. He mocks shooters who claim that external influences caused their decisions and proudly takes responsible for his actions.

When Kevin watches the news with Franklin, he is doing reconnaissance for violence, often from the History Channel segments. When the family watches Braveheart—an acclaimed but incredibly violent film—Eva notices that Kevin does not empathize with a character as he is being tortured. He is unable to imagine the events on screen are happening to him, which is an empathy required to make tension in fiction effective.

Eva describes the documentarian Jack Marlin’s treatment of Kevin as “grateful,” which vindicates Kevin’s claims that the audience of people who enjoy violence and derangement would suffer in the absence of people like him.

The Big Question, Life Without Meaning, and the Pain of Exclusion

There are two big questions addressed in the novel. The first question is whether life has any meaning. The second question is why Kevin would kill anyone. Eva never has an answer to the second question, but she does, at least at times, believe that life has a purpose.

As to possible reasons for Kevin’s crimes, Eva describes Kevin as feeling outraged about everything in his life, including the fact that he exists. Even as a baby, Kevin seems to feel as if he doesn’t belong. He cannot see the point of anything; therefore, he refuses to treat anything seriously. The list of his victims shows the core of his philosophy to the extent that he has one: Kevin says he chose his victims because they got on his nerves, but Eva sees that each of the kids on the list had a passion. Because Kevin feels no enthusiasm, he cannot abide it in others. He feels no purpose in his life, which echoes Eva’s remark:

if there’s no reason to live without a child, how could there be with one? To answer one life with a successive life is simply to transfer the onus of purpose to the next generation; the displacement amounts to a cowardly and potentially infinite delay (268).

If she is right, she has now placed that onus on Kevin. Regardless of whether he is a monster, he had no control over whether he was born.

Kevin is doomed to always feel left out among those who imbue life with meaning, even if it is simply a student’s passion for basketball or film. Vicki Pagorski, while seemingly eccentric, seems to actually care about acting and her aspiring thespians. Kevin sees this passion in her and ruins her career. When he sees the girl dancing in her tacky dress, he cannot stand that she is enjoying herself with no inhibition. He feels the same way about Celia, who treats everything with wonder. AWAP, which gave Eva such passion at times, loses half of its value and is eventually sold as a result of his targeting it with a virus. He knows Eva’s passion for cartography manifests in the maps in her study, which is why he targets them.

Kevin has no meaning in his life so he does not want anyone else to either. He conducts the massacre in such a way that the question everyone asks—why he did it—cannot be answered. Kevin even derides other shooters if he thinks they commit their crimes for the wrong reasons. He wants people to feel the way he feels to prove to them there is no point to anything. At the end of the novel, Kevin admits he is no longer sure why he committed the crime. If even Kevin isn’t sure of his motives, then the act has become truly meaningless, and the question of why will remain forever unanswerable.