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62 pages 2 hours read

Jennifer Egan

The Candy House

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022

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Symbols & Motifs

The Candy House

The novel is named after the house in Hansel and Gretel and alludes to the concept of the Faustian bargain. Essentially, the Faustian bargain occurs when someone knowingly gives up their moral code for something like endless knowledge. A candy house is Faustian in that people are seduced away from their moral codes. People might have an inkling that they are being tricked, but the candy house represents a more subliminal seduction. The candy house in Hansel and Gretel has been constructed by an evil witch to entice children, and Hansel and Gretel are particularly vulnerable because they have been abandoned and are starving. In this novel, the candy house takes on multiple forms, making it an important motif throughout the novel. As a general concept, the central candy house is online technology, such as Bix Bouton’s Own Your Unconscious. People see this technology as revolutionary, something that will change humanity for good. But when people are easily seduced by new knowledge (in this case, access to a collective consciousness), they can unwittingly ignore the potential ramifications of such knowledge. Every Faustian bargain comes with a price, and in Own Your Unconscious, people give up privacy, individualism, imagination, and their own interpretations of their pasts to receive knowledge of themselves and others.

Algorithms

In The Candy House, algorithms symbolize the complexity of human connection. Algorithms are used by Miranda Kline to explain human behavior, by Bix Bouton to create Own Your Unconscious, by Chris to algebraize story elements, and by Lincoln to understand everything around him. The algorithms in this novel help anxious people figure out the secrets of human connection, though this connection is somewhat a fallacy because of its very nature as an algorithm. Egan’s novel seeks to answer whether humans are capable of being evaluated through algorithms. Humans like to believe that there is a wide array of diversity within the human population: nationality, race, gender, sex, sexual orientation, language, ability, physicality, and more. But these are just labels, and Egan’s novel asks if it’s possible to look beneath exterior labels of the exteriority, capture people’s interiorities, and use that capture to create a collective consciousness. Algorithms in this novel are literal equations, but they are also metaphors that represent the human desire to categorize and better understand the chaotic world we live in.

Memory

Memory is an important motif in this novel. Characters are fixated on the possibilities of memories to hold the answers to their lives. Rather than deal with life in the present moment, characters long for the past in a nostalgic yearning for a redo on their lives. Certain memories do shape the people we become because of their inherent importance, but memories are generally vestiges of a past and may not signify anything important. Egan reveals this through Charlie and Roxy’s explorations of memories to try to know their father better. Memory here represents not the actual existence of memories, but the symbolic importance humans project onto their memories. The internal conflict about memories also presents a conundrum that threatens to pause character development, because Egan asks how access to memories can actually be helpful. Memories are facts, not necessarily interpretations. They are not stories or narratives, so they can exist without inherent meaning.

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