Beautiful Graves

The rat experiment that Joe describes to Ever in Chapter 28 symbolizes the tentative nature of hope and the underlying fear that such hope might be mercilessly crushed. The scene indicates that the presence of hope can produce massive relief, but when it is repeatedly undermined, its unreliability can eliminate a person’s will to persevere. To illustrate this point, Joe describes the 1950s experiment by Curt Richter as a show of resilience and the power of hope. Richter “threw rats into bucketsful of water and watched them drown” (325), saving some while letting others die, and he discovered that the rats who had a hope of escape fought harder to survive. Joe compares himself to the rat and Ever to the experimenter. Her back-and-forth decision about whether or not to pursue a relationship with Joe strikes him as a similar dynamic to Richter’s act of temporarily saving a rat only to throw it back into the bucket. With Joe and Ever’s current dynamic, Joe cycles between excitement and devastation as she repeatedly fosters a connection with him and then sabotages the relationship.

Toward the end of the novel, Joe admits that he is done chasing after Ever, and he stays true to his word when she leaves him for a third time. Rather than chasing her to the airport, he decides to give up. Fortunately, Ever sees the error of her ways and makes an effort to repair their relationship. They reconnect only after she promises, in her own metaphorical way, to discontinue the experiment and never throw him into the bucket of water again.