67 pages • 2 hours read
Laura McBrideWe Are Called to Rise
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “Avis”
Avis and Jim attend a city council meeting together to watch their son, Nate, get sworn in as a police officer. Nate doesn’t know about his father’s affair, but they decide not to tell him until later. Avis remembers when she would walk Nate to school and take care of him while Jim was at work. We learn Avis became pregnant shortly after Emily died. She wasn’t prepared to have another child but accepted her fate.
At City Hall, Avis and Jim’s daughter-in-law, Lauren, joins them. Jim thanks Lauren for putting up with Nate, and Avis can see how uncomfortable this makes Lauren. Avis has already established that she fears her son since he returned from his last tour of duty in Iraq, but it’s unclear whether Jim is referring to anything specific. The three go through the motions, “only pretending to be together” (37). During the swearing-in of the new Las Vegas Police Department (LVPD) officers, Avis looks at her son and realizes how muscular he has grown from being a soldier.
The ceremony makes Avis think about Nate as a boy and how peaceful his childhood was in comparison to hers. She quickly returns to reality when Lauren begins to adjust in her seat; Avis notices Lauren has a bruise on her shoulder. Avis tries not to think about it in the moment of her son’s accomplishment but worries she hasn’t paid enough attention to her boy’s growing anger problems. After all the cadets give their oaths, Nate smiles, and Avis looks at Lauren; they “both believe that things will be okay” (43).
Chapter 5 Summary: “Bashkim”
Bashkim is learning about the Iraq War in school. Photos of Iraq and Afghanistan are compared to photos of Nevada, and the terrains look so identical that the students can’t tell them apart. He also learns that the students will begin a pen pal correspondence with American soldiers in the war. He is excited to write his soldier, though he isn’t even sure why the US is at war with Iraq. The photos of Nevada remind Bashkim of how his mother always tells him about how Albania’s beautiful night sky is. He wonders why Las Vegas doesn’t have as many stars as Albania.
The next day the students write the soldiers. Bashkim’s assigned soldier is Specialist Luis Rodriguez-Reyes. The name reminds Bashkim of his Mexican friend, Carlo, and this makes him happy about writing his letter. Bashkim tells Specialist Rodriguez-Reyes about the ice cream truck his family operates, and how he sometimes helps his parents by working in the truck. He ends the letter by asking Luis if he has ever had to kill anyone. Mrs. Monaghan sees this and announces to the class that they shouldn’t ask the soldiers about “their soldier work” (51).
Eventually, the students receive their letters back from the soldiers. Bashkim can’t wait to read his, but when he does, he is frightened and shocked. Luis tells him that he has killed a boy and that with a name like Bashkim, “someone is going to try to kill you some day” (54). Bashkim feels nauseous, and when Mrs. Monaghan comes to check on him, she reads his letter and is also disturbed. Bashkim vomits on her, unable to control his nerves. He is sent to the principal’s office, and he worries that he’s in trouble. His record as a perfect student has been broken, so it’s his worst day. Luckily, only Nene comes to pick him up because Baba is taking a nap, but the principal, Dr. Moore, schedules a meeting for the next morning. Bashkim is worried about how Baba will deal with it, especially since he has a bad history with authority in his country.
The next day, the meeting goes horribly, as Bashkim anticipated. Baba becomes angry and yells at everyone, including Dr. Moore, even demanding money as compensation for his son’s “hurt.” When Baba’s fury grows, Dr. Moore asks Bashkim to leave for his class, but this further angers Baba, who feels only he should tell his son what to do. Frustrated, Nene announces, “For love of Allah [...] Just kill me and my children if this is how life will be” (56), a comment she often makes out of frustration. Dr. Moore calls security, and Bashkim is deeply embarrassed.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Luis”
Luis’s chapter begins with uncertainty and confusion, as he slowly gains consciousness in a white room with bright lights. He has a pounding headache, and it’s clear he is in a hospital recovering from an accident but has no memory of anything. He doesn’t know where he is and can only see silhouettes in his blurry vision. He keeps falling in and out of sleep and thinks he hears someone calling his name. Two people nearby are talking about him, saying he hasn’t opened his eyes yet.
After an undisclosed amount of time—maybe hours, maybe days—someone is next to him again, holding his hand and calling his name. He is unable to fully wake up even though he hears a nurse talking to him. He begins to have a flashback about war with someone named Sam. There are explosions, and Sam’s face is missing. He pulls Sam’s body out of the fray, and that’s all he can remember. Luis continues dreaming about being on a mission with Sam in Iraq, making jokes about each other’s racial backgrounds, since Sam is white and Luis is Mexican. None of it makes sense. He can’t wake up but wants to.
Finally, someone named Dr. Ghosh begins to announce himself. For a few days in a row, Luis can’t see anything but hears Dr. Ghosh’s constant presence. He doesn’t know why Dr. Ghosh doesn’t just wake him up. He suddenly remembers a kid but doesn’t know why or from what. He thinks about Sam and the boy, and Dr. Ghosh hears him talking in his sleep and tells Luis that the boy is fine and that he can wake up now. Eventually, Luis wakes up, and Dr. Ghosh is there. Luis doesn’t know where he is or why. He is unable to speak and can’t really feel his body. His head hurts, and he falls back asleep. Later, there is someone in the room again, but this time Luis intentionally keeps his eyes closed because he doesn’t want to talk to anyone. He starts to remember who shot him and knows there is “something about a kid” (63).
Chapters 4-6 Analysis
Avis has fond memories of her days as a young mother and housewife. Though Nate became more boisterous as he grew older, she spent every morning with the comforting support of other moms in the neighborhood, drinking coffee and gossiping. Families would often invite each other over to birthday parties, and everything seemed perfect. She relishes having been accepted by society, especially after her tough childhood, admitting:
That’s the day when my old life seemed to slip completely off me, when a group of women assumed I was one of them, a suburban mom with a sweet-faced child headed off to school. That was the first time I ever went to have a cup of coffee with women who had been to college, the first time nobody seemed to notice that my memories were not the same as theirs (43).
This passage reveals Avis’s desire to assimilate to the status quo and to define herself as a mother and wife. When this idyllic view of herself is shattered, she must learn how to recover and rebuild her identity with a new purpose.
She is in a stage of denial at the moment—hoping things with Jim might still work out, and trying to ignore signs of abuse between Lauren and Nate—and she convinces herself to find the positives, such as Nate completing his LVPD training. She still hasn’t let go of her identity as a normal mother and wife, clinging to this image of herself.
Nate’s adulthood as a hardened soldier and rookie police officer contrasts with Avis’s memories of him as a sweet, innocent, and loving boy. This theme of innocence becomes more apparent given Bashkim’s role in the story: He is a boy who yearns to do well but has to deal with his parents’ problems. Bashkim is young and, though perceptive, still hasn’t been exposed to the worst aspects of the world. When learning about the Iraq War in school, he maintains a child-like purity, wondering why the US is at war with Iraq but then forgetting to ask his teacher because he’d rather think about his soldier pen pal. The theme of war as destructive and meaningless slowly begins to emerge in these chapters, as Bashkim’s teachers show the kids photos of how similar Iraq’s landscape is to Nevada’s. This comparison suggests that even when people and places seem impossibly distant, they can be more similar than we might expect.
Bashkim’s need for order can be interpreted as a response to how chaotic his home life is. There are references to how abusive his Baba is, and his anger during the parent conference exemplifies this. Therefore, when Specialist Rodriguez-Reyes threatens Bashkim’s sense of security at school, the moment marks an awakening to how violent and insensitive the outside world can be. This is directly apparent when Luis tells him: “You might as well start killing mice with your baba, or whatever you call your dad, because with a name like yours, someone is going to try to kill you some day” (54).
Luis’s chapter displays a noticeable change in the structure and format of the text. The paragraphs become shorter and the narrative is less coherent. This mimics the character’s own internal confusion and lack of clarity. Just as Luis is unable to make sense of his own world—clearly suffering from PTSD after the death of his friend, Sam, in battle—the reader must struggle to piece together the bits of information his narrative offers. He seems bitter and distant, which is communicated when he refuses to talk with others: “I have been lying here awake a long time, but I keep my eyes shut, because there is someone in the room, and I don’t want to talk to whoever it is” (63). He is in pain, literally and figuratively, and his position of vulnerability as a hospital patient only amplifies his frustration.
A theme of toxic masculinity—the idea that men are emotionally insecure, harmful, aggressive, and/or abusively controlling—seems to underscore Luis’s personality and also manifests in Bashkim’s baba and Nate. The men in the story seem unable to control their emotions and have fits of rage beyond their control. This serves as a foreshadowing to how destructive these men will be in the lives of their family members, especially the women. Luis, in particular, is so out of touch with himself as a man at this point in the text that he “can't feel my arm, and I am not sure if I have a body” (62). Similar to Avis and Bashkim, Luis—as well as the rest of the men thus far in the story—will have a long road to recovery ahead.
