Feed & Enthrallment
Mankind is foolish. [Psalm 118:1-9; 1 Corinthians 3:18-23] It would be easy to say "No one would actually want to live a life of eternal torment! The lost are being deceived!" This is simply untrue. Especially in the Western world, all have thought deliberately and at length about Christ, and their lives reflect their conclusions. It would be easy to say "No one would actually want to live a life of eternal torment! Mankind will find a way to be victorious!" This is simply untrue. Mankind is weak and powerless. Optimism cannot be directed towards the human race as it exists. [Psalm 50:16-23, 53:1-6; Ecclesiastes 8-9; Jude 1:5-16] We have created a world where we replace direction with meaninglessness and replace experience with simulation because meaninglessness and simulation are mankind's most venerated deities. For all of human existence, we have been seeking to move towards these things, to move away from Christ. Feed envisions a world not unlike our own, where no one wants to feel pain because no one wants to feel anything at all. Feed shows us a boy who learns the value of living a meaningful life does not come from enchantments but from experiencing life at its core.
Violet is the antithesis to most of Feed's world. She is introduced in the novel by Titus as the only good thing in a world that, as Titus opens the book with, "turned out to completely suck." In a world where most children are given the Feed as soon as possible, Violet's parents keep the Feed from her until she's seven years old. She is not raised on the Feed like most people are; she merely has the Feed. Violet does not find the Feed enchanting. She rebels against it. She explains to Titus, her boyfriend, "Everything we've grown up with – the stories on the feed, the games all of that – it's all streamlining our personalities so we're easier to sell to. . . what I've been doing over the feed for the last two days, is trying to create a customer profile that's so screwed, nobody can market to it."[1] She has a visceral hatred for the Feed and what it does to people, but she has a love for Titus and his "normalness." Despite Violet's charged opinions on the feed, she is soft with Titus:
"I [Titus] asked, 'Why don't you just use the feed? It's way faster.'
"'I’m pretentious,' she said. 'Really pretentious.'
"Yeah, so the studio audience has noticed, but seriously.'
"Seriously.'"[2]
So then, who is this Titus?
Titus is representative of most people in the life of Feed's America. It is for this reason he is cast as the main character, the narrator of the novel. Titus is a pretty normal teenage boy. He likes girls and hooking up with them. He likes keeping up with recent trends. He likes abusing his body, though with the Feed, you don't have to smoke or snort but instead inject malicious software into yourself. He doesn't think about anything. He is an entirely reactive person. Titus describes the Feed in many ways, but one of the more poignant descriptions,
"The sun was rising over foreign countries, and underwear was cheap, and there were new techniques to reconfigure pecs, abs, and nipples, and the President of the United States was certain of the future, and at Weatherbee & Crotch there was a sale banner and nice rugby shirts. . . and as I fell asleep, the feed murmured to me again and again, All shall be well. . ."[3]
shows how enamored Titus, and by extension America, is with the Feed, with a world that caters to these feelings. When Titus lands on the moon for his Spring break, "our feeds were going fugue with all the banners. The hotels were jumping on each other. . . I was trying to talk to Link, but I couldn't because I was getting bannered so hard, and I kept blinking and trying to walk forward. . ."[4] The world is designed to come to him. All Titus has to do is exist, and the world is at his feet. He can see everything, know anything, et cetera. Titus is wholly enchanted by the Feed. Titus cannot picture life without the Feed. He cannot picture life outside of America, outside of his neighborhood, without his friends. He is physically and mentally incapable of imagining these things. Titus is completely enthralled by the Feed, by modern American life.
Even though one would think Violet’s contrarian nature frees her from the Feed, makes her fundamentally unlike Titus and everyone else, it does no such thing. Violet is a human, just like everyone else, and she lives in the same human society as everyone else. Her life as a counter to the Feed is necessarily dependent on it. All of her antifeed sentiments are fed to her through the Feed. We see this somewhat with her love for Titus, for the "normal." She hates the feed, but she loves the normal, and necessarily loves the Feed because the Feed is normal. She recognizes internally that she cannot escape the Feed, not really, and is trying to live around it. Her father is talking with Titus and echoes this sentiment in his own life, the reason he gave Violet the Feed in the first place: "I realized that they had chatted me [communicated telepathically], and that I had not responded. They found this funny. Risible. That a man would not have a feed. . . I did not get the job. It was thus that I realized my daughter would need the feed."[5] Violet even has fun with the Feed. When she and Titus are at the mall, trying to disrupt the targeted ads, she's having a lot of fun. Even so, the Feed is still a bad thing, a net negative, still takes people down with it. The Feed kills Violet. She and Titus and others are hacked early on in the novel, and because Violet was a late adopter, her body cannot handle the hacking, and the Feed begins to rebel against her instead. It weakens Violet, not just her body, which begins to lose the ability to function, but her mind and spirit also. As she realizes the nature of her coexistence with the Feed, Violet begins to give in to her urges to be "normal." When Violet gives in to her own fears and moral failings, turns towards the world she has worked so hard to rebel against, and wants to have sex with Titus so she knows what it feels like before she dies, when Violet offers Titus something that's been on his mind the entire time he's known Violet, Titus can only say "It feels like I'm being felt up by a zombie, okay?" and states
"No – I can't field this. You were, the whole time, you were just planning this whole eternal thing, and I was supposed to just automatically love you always, but I didn't even know. I was just thinking about going out with you, and we would have some fun for a few months, but to you, I was a normal guy, I was magic Mr. Normal Dumb--, with my dumb-- normal friends. . ."[6]
and still wants that, but Violet by this point has awakened something in Titus. Knowing how little time he has left before the pain of Violet's awful life consumes the both of them. Even though he is beginning to see the vague picture of the downfalls of mindless month-long flings and endless titillation and the modern American dream, the vision that Violet is losing but trying to hold on to, that life of indulgence is all Titus knows, and it is what keeps Titus comfortable, so he simultaneously holds on to the life he has while embracing the life he is about to wake up to. Violet is going to die. Titus has no idea what death is like. He has never wanted to know. Life has removed that from Titus.
Violet's death and downfall are what ultimately lead Titus to freedom – or something like it. Even though Violet was never truly free from the Feed, she was able to live out this sense of freedom anyway, not because she was ultimately independent from the Feed, but because she had managed to see the truth and accept the truth. She gives this to Titus. She gives it because she loved, loves, Titus for being who Titus is. She gives it because Titus had seemed to her ready for the seed she wanted to sow. Violet likely dies thinking she was wrong, but she held out to the very end, and the reader can see the stems breaking up from the soil, so to speak. At the very end of the novel:
"I tore at my pants. I was trying so hard to get them off that they ripped. I took off my sweatshirt. I threw my boxer shorts against the wall. I was naked. Completely naked.
"I sat on the rug. I sat in the middle of the floor. I could smell my own sweat from my folded places. I sat there."[7]
Titus isn't having fun anymore. Titus finds himself ashamed of himself and of the world he finds himself in. He ditches the coverings the world has gave him and has returned to his naked form, and can smell the stench of his own body. Even these simple things had been stripped away from him before. Titus's new life is painful, cumbersome, hard to bear, but it is freedom and it is truth. Titus is finally free from needing to do whatever he wants to and is able to grow into the person he is designed to be.
Only Christ can enable you to live around your sin. Otherwise, you will live in your sin and your sin will stand vigilant guard over your grave for all eternity. Sin will wrap you up in a warm and cozy blanket and sing you lullabies to sleep and you will be enthralled to have it as a caretaker should you not let Christ in your life. Sin's mockery of a victory in this current epoch will be smote once Christ establishes His Kingdom on a renewed Earth, personally. On that day, there will be no more sin we have to live around. Do not let the circumstances of yourself and your world lead you away from telling others about the Gospel. We are commanded by Christ to evangelize. [Matthew 28:16-20; Romans 10:1-21, 11:1-6] One may think to themselves, "Why curse someone with the suffering and pain of the Christian life?" Why did Violet &aquot;curse" Titus with the pain of the truth? The answer is that pain and suffering for Christ is in and of itself life. To live as Titus and his friends have lived is not to have lived at all, sick or otherwise, but to be dead. Titus is dead, but Violet raised him from the dead through her own death. How much more did Christ's death, the death of our Lord Himself incarnate in flesh, raise you from your own tomb and clothe you and give you life and send you forth. It is imperative that you show other people this great moment of anguish so that they may be given life too.