You

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2014

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-10

Chapters 11-20

Chapters 21-30

Chapters 31-40

Chapters 41-53

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Literature and Pop Culture

You is filled with references to literature and pop culture. Joe uses these references as symbolic engagements with a world he does not quite understand. Without friends or family members, Joe is cut off from most of the world. He has no social engagement beyond his coworkers. Books, television, and films provide him with a form of social engagement he does not get elsewhere. Joe’s frequent references to literature and pop culture are symbolic attempts to engage with the world. These attempts function in both directions: He references books and films to connect with people, hoping that they will appreciate his taste and preferences—but, at the same time, he judges others based on their ability to reference literature and pop culture, or through the type of literature they choose to read. Working in a bookstore, Joe fosters relationships with people based on what he sells them. He also judges them if they decide to buy a book he believes is unworthy. These references, judgments, and connections symbolize Joe’s struggles to form meaningful connections with the world around him. Since he cannot form actual connections, he relies on literature and pop culture to provide an artificial and temporary bond with other people.

Literature and pop culture also symbolize the class differences that Joe experiences. Joe comes from a poor background and did not attend college. He is well-read and intelligent, but he feels insecure that he lacks the academic credentials associated with intelligence. People like Benji and Peach have the academic credentials provided by college, but they are not as well-read or as intelligent as Joe, at least in his opinion. He uses his literary knowledge to make up for his insecurities; he is occasionally desperate to prove that he can match or surpass others intellectually. When Beck tells Joe that he has read more books than people in her graduate course, for example, he feels validated. As much as Joe loves literature and pop culture, its association with academics and class differences is an annoying reminder of his diminished resources. Joe uses literature to assert his identity and to try and overcome his past poverty. However, his love of literature also reminds him that he remains an outsider in a society where such a love is associated with formal education and privilege.

Joe’s narration is littered with literary references because this is one of the few ways in which he can come to terms with other people. An event or a person is never unique; instead, this person or event is compared to something in a work of fiction. These references give his narration a symbolic weight: Joe feels he inhabits a world as fake as the fiction he frequently references. To him, others’ lives are just a part of a fictional universe in which he is the protagonist. Everyone else is an accessory to his story.

Telephones

In You, telephones are diverse symbols. On a basic level, they symbolize the difference between public and private lives. They are used to access social media, which allows people to create and curate a public persona. Instagram, Twitter, and similar social networks are accessed through telephones, meaning that telephones become symbolic tools of this creation process. However, the public personas that they create are ultimately unreliable reflections of reality. When Joe takes Benji’s phone, he creates a narrative about Benji’s drug addiction even though Benji is already dead. Joe creates a false life using a telephone, symbolizing the hollowness of public personas created by telephones.

A telephone also symbolizes a person’s connection to the public world, but it becomes a repository for more private, authentic personas, as seen in emails or journals. The discrepancy between the public and the private world is contained entirely within the telephones, so they become vital symbols of the ways in which these discrepancies define people. The version of Beck on her public social media posts is quite different from the private emails she exchanges with her friends. As a person with access to both, Joe can read these differences and build a psychological profile of Beck. The telephone is an illicit tool he uses to uncover the truth about the object of his obsession.

When Joe steals Beck’s telephone, he makes a symbolic gesture. Reading her private communications, he does not care about any moral or social boundaries; all Joe cares about is possessing and controlling Beck. His theft of Beck’s phone and his continued access to her emails symbolize his amorality. Joe then uses his knowledge of Beck’s private identity to smuggle himself into her life. Beck’s phone becomes a symbol of Joe’s willingness to cross any line to make Beck fall in love with him.

Buildings

The novel’s buildings and physical spaces symbolize their inhabitants. As part of her college program, Beck was awarded tenancy of a small apartment in a nice neighborhood. She feels constricted by the small space; the apartment symbolizes how she feels constricted and restrained by her academic career. Beck pushes back by opening herself to a world beyond academics, and her open windows and lack of curtains symbolize this openness. Just as she engages with Joe and Dr. Nicky, she wants the non-college world to observe and validate her, to address the lack of confidence and insecurity she feels daily. Beck may be awarded her apartment as part of an academic program, but the way she inhabits the physical space symbolizes her insecurities in a wider, non-academic sense.

Unlike Beck, Joe lives in a rundown and less desirable neighborhood. Whereas Beck’s apartment is well-lit, open, and filled with new objects, Joe’s apartment is dark, dingy, and filled with old objects that he found in the street. The furniture is taken from alleyways, and Joe’s collection of antique typewriters takes up more space than he has available. The differences between Joe’s and Beck’s apartments symbolize the differences in their personalities, suggesting that they are not the perfect match that Joe believes them to be. Added to this, Joe’s apartment is a symbol of his fractured psyche. At one point, Joe throws a typewriter against the wall, creating a hole. He uses a typewriter—an object of his obsession—to damage his living space. Rather than repair this hole, Joe fills it with the items he stole from Beck, another object of his obsession. Joe wants to repair neither his wall nor his psyche. Rather than seek help with such repairs, he fills the empty spaces with his obsessions.

In the bookstore’s basement is a soundproof, airtight cage used for storing valuable old books. The cage is a metaphor for Joe’s mental state. It provides him with a place to imprison people, including Benji and Beck. Joe locks these people away from the world, hiding his obsessions from public view and keeping them in a place only he can access. He feels an obsessive need to control everything, and imprisoning people fulfills that need. He may not be able to control Beck’s emotions, but he can control her physical space. Joe learned this behavior at a young age, when Mr. Mooney locked him inside the cage as punishment for losing a valuable book. He now believes he has the right to imprison and punish others in the same way that he was imprisoned and punished. The cage symbolizes the distorted perceptions that Joe inherited at a young age and continued through to his adult life.