50 pages • 1 hour read
Dave EggersWhat Is The What
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2006A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaBook 1, Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Book 1
Chapter 4 Summary
Deng describes his best day in a flashback. He is 6 years old. When he arrives at school, he is told that school has been cancelled for the day, and he can go home and do what he wants. His mother is his father’s first wife out of six wives total, and he goes home to spend time with her, helping around the home. She calls him Achak, which is his given name; later, nicknames would stand in for it. Deng’s mother sends him off to play with his friends Moses and William K. Moses likes to shape little cows out of clay. William K crushes one of them, and the boys fight. They are interrupted by the sight of a beautiful, shiny bicycle. Jok Nyibek Arou, the local tailor, is the owner of the bike. He offers to ride it for the boys, but goes very slowly and keeps the plastic on it, so they make fun of the man a little. He lets the boys watch the bike for him when he goes inside.
Later, Deng annoys his sister, Amel, and she sends him off to see Amath, a girl who is his sister’s age and whom Deng has a crush on. He offers to run and fetch some water for Amath from the river, and runs fast to collect it. On the way, he stops by his father’s shop to get a container. His father gives him a jerry can—the sort of container used for holding water or gasoline—and Valentino goes to the river, where some washerwomen are working. He borrows a bowl and fills the jerry can, carefully filtering the water through his shirt to catch the detritus. He rushes back to Amath, but just as he reaches her, he trips and falls. Although he has some minor injuries, the water is not spilled, and he enjoys Amath tending to him and brushing him off. He thinks about weddings, and how he would like to avoid them, but naturally also thinks of Amath in her pretty dress at an upcoming wedding. He knows her clothes because he observes her house from a place in a nearby tree sometimes.
Chapter 5 Summary
The novel returns to its narrative present. Deng is still staring at Michael. He realizes that the tape over his mouth is loosening. He thinks of how, in his country, he has seen boys who are Michael’s age used as child soldiers or pressed into serving people they shouldn’t. Part of Deng wants to save Michael. Deng knows that life in Sudan would be impossible to return to, as they are far behind the times:
[I]n southern Sudan, we are by any estimation at least a few hundred years behind the industrialized world. Some sociologists, liberal ones, might take issue with the notion that one society is behind another, that there is a first world, a third. But southern Sudan is not any of these worlds. Sudan is something else, and I cannot find apt comparison (49).
Deng speaks aloud to the boy, and Michael seems frightened. Michael grabs a phone book and drops it on Deng’s head, making Deng both physically and emotionally uncomfortable: “This boy thinks I am not of his species, that I am some other kind of creature, one that can be crushed under the weight of a phone book. The pain is not great, but the symbolism is disagreeable” (50).
Chapter 6 Summary
Deng wakes up from an accidental sleep. Michael has fallen asleep on the couch and is having a nightmare. Deng wishes that his roommate, Achor Achor, would return home to rescue him, and although he is happy that his friend has found love with Michelle, right now Deng deems his behavior as unknowingly irresponsible. Michael’s phone rings several times, and finally he wakes to answer it, revealing for the first time that his name is Michael. Deng recalls that Michael is also the name of the man who first brought war to his village of Marial Bai.
The narrative moves to a series of flashbacks. William K has come to Deng’s house to wake up, telling him there’s something to see. When they arrive at the mosque, there’s a young man, Michael Luol, sitting in a chair, talking to a small crowd. Luol is missing a hand. The crowd angrily debates about sharia law coming to Sudan, and how the punishment for theft is the cutting off of a hand. Some blame the young man for going to Khartoum in the first place, instead of staying in his village. It turns out that Luol had gone to Khartoum as a student, and then found work there. Eventually, he lost his job and was forced to live with other Dinkas on the outskirts of town, in a tent city. He found a wife, but since the living conditions were terrible, she died of dysentery. The story goes that he stole one of the bricks from his old job at the bricklayer’s to help hold down the plastic and sticks his house was built from.
There’s been much concern about sharia law coming to South Sudan. This is partly due to a sweeping series of laws called the September Laws, and partially due to the tearing up of a document called the Addis Ababa Agreement, which had given South Sudan the authority to rule itself: “In its place, the south was divided into three regions, which effectively pitted each of them against the others, with no region left with any significant government power at all” (56).
Deng thinks about the things from his past he now sees, with hindsight, as steps toward war. On one Saturday, he goes to his father’s shop and finds his father’s Arabic friend, Sadiq, who is a trader. Sadiq gives Deng a marble that looks like a gem, has him practice speaking in Arabic, and puts him up on a horse. The horse bites Deng, prompting his father to take him from the saddle.
That night, a number of Arabic men are having dinner with them. Talk turns to politics. Among the group is a young man who is always grinning, and who seems to enjoy asking sensitive questions of a political nature, such as, “don’t you worry about this business with the insurrection?” (60). The young man goes on to say that the Arabs seem to have the support of the Ethiopians and that a civil war may be brewing. The men ask Deng’s father for a story, specifically the Dinka story about the beginning of time. He tells it, and the Arabs seem to laughingly enjoy it, treating it as an amusement, rather than the revered creation myth it is meant to be. Deng’s father finishes the story, though Deng notices that it ends differently than usual, without the sentiment that Arabs were created as less than perfect, second-tier creations after the Dinka people, who were gifted all the good things by the creator.
The next morning, Deng sees Sadiq for the last time, as well as the soldiers who have been patrolling the village for years. A few weeks later, war has begun and is marked for Deng by the moment when the grinning man from before and two of his comrades ride into town and visit Deng’s father at his shop. They demand all his sugar; when Deng’s father tells them that they need to pay for it, they give excuses about the cause needing his donation. When Deng’s father continues to protest, they march him out front of the shop and tie him up. When Deng’s mother arrives on the scene to protest on his behalf, they point a gun at her and threaten to kill both of them. She throws herself in front of the rifle and exclaims, “You’ll have to kill me too” (68). Instead, the men kick Deng’s father in the face until they hear a crack and leave with the sugar. From then on, the village of Marial Bai is a town engulfed in conflict between the rebels and the government:
The rebels came at night, raiding where they could, and during the day, government army soldiers patrolled the village, the market in particular, reeking of menace. They cocked and uncocked their rifles. They were suspicious of anyone unfamiliar; young men were harassed at every opportunity. Who are you? Are you with these rebels? Trust in the army had evaporated. The uninvolved had to choose sides (69).
Soon after this, Deng and his friends begin to see other signs. They watch a young man named Kolong Gar escape the village at night as a deserter, avoiding soldiers, obviously on his way to join the rebels. Then, one day, the soldiers are gone, along with all their belongings. The mosque closes and the Arab traders disappear. The rebels appear, now calling themselves the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, but they leave soon after as well, before the burning of the village.
Book 1, Chapters 4-6 Analysis
Deng contrasts his current situation—that is, one of his worst days—with the his perfect day. This provides insight into the vast distance between the two, and begins to reveal just how far from a utopia this new life in America really is. His best memories come from early childhood, before the troubles began in Sudan, and long before his march or the trip to America. He remembers simple pleasures, like the amazing bicycle owned by someone in his village, his interactions with his friends, and his first crush, Amath.
Michael drops a phonebook on Deng’s head to try to silence him, which is a disturbing metaphor for how the boy sees the man. To Michael, Deng is an insect, an annoying pest, and can be squashed in the same way one might crush a beetle. Michael, who is obviously subservient and cowed by his guardians Tonya and Powder, still feels that he is superior to Deng and can use violence to solve his problem.
This section of the book illuminates the tension between in Sudan, and how the religious and cultural differences came to a head. In southern Sudan, the Dinka people lived generally under the sway of Christianity, and resented the Muslim influence from the north, centered in the city of Khartoum. Although there had been political treaties and acts to stave off violence, such as the Addis Ababa Agreement, which was signed after the First Sudanese Civil War, the tension remained.
The agreement was torn up around the time that the September Laws went into effect, which allowed southern Sudan to rule itself. This had the effect of pitting many groups in the south against one another, which left them unable to provide a united front when sharia law began to creep in from the north. A clear example of this is provided in Chapter 6, when Deng’s father tells some visiting Arabic friends about the creation of the world, according to Dinka myth. Deng notes that his father leaves out the part specifically about the superiority of the Dinka and the inferiority of the Arabs:
In the version my father told to me, God had given the What to the Arabs, and this was why the Arabs were inferior. The Dinka were given the cattle first, and the Arabs had tried to steal them. God had given the Dinka superior land, fertile and rich, and had given them cattle, and though it was unfair, that was how God had intended it and there was no changing it (63).
This is the first time Deng experiences the differences between the two cultures. At the time, he believed that his father had done so to spare the feelings of the Arabs, who must know they were inferior to the Dinka, and that it would be impolite to explain this at dinner. This innocent take on the political minefield of this conversation will eventually lead to the panic and horror Deng later experiences when his village is invaded by the Muslim north, and how devastating it is when he sees someone that was formerly a guest at their table taking his father’s goods and assaulting his father.
Related Titles
By Dave Eggers
