Parable of the Sower

The year is 2024. Lauren, the narrator, speaks in the first person as if she’s writing in her dated journal; such a format, with quotes from her book at the beginning of each chapter, implies that she becomes an important person. She begins this chapter by talking about a dream she had. She is learning to fly but runs into a fire: “It blazes up around me. I thrash and scramble and try to swim back of it, grabbing handfuls of air and fire, kicking, burning. Darkness” (14).

Then she sees stars, and she is talking with her stepmother Cory about them as they hang laundry in their neighborhood, surrounded by the wall that is a “massive, looming presence” (15). Her stepmother says they couldn’t see stars when she was a child because the city lights obscured them—“lights, progress, growth, all those things we’re too hot and too poor to bother with anymore” (15). Lauren says she’d rather have the stars. Cory, on the other hand, says she’d rather have the city lights back, but “the stars are free.” (16).