36 pages • 1-hour read
No One is Talking About This
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1, Chapters 4-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary
The protagonist and other users are confronted with evidence that the portal itself contributed to the dictator’s rise to power. The protagonist questions how the collective behavior of the portal will look to future historians and uses the analogy of “normalizing” to consider how the portal seeks to normalize everything, resulting in a homogenized global culture. The protagonist relates the story of musician Thom Yorke subtly changing his live musical performances so that the crowd could not anticipate the song and sing with him. Yorke afterward claims that this technique allowed him to feel a creative transcendence that “wasn’t a human feeling” (55).
The protagonist relates a memory in which she walked through Washington Square Park with a woman she knew from the portal. During their walk, the woman talks about a man she often sees at the park and how she considers herself someone to watch over him and remember his presence. When the woman later disappears and the portal cannot provide any information about her disappearance, the protagonist believes she should have been watching over the woman so that she would be remembered.
When one of the protagonist’s posts gains fleeting popularity in the portal, her emotions become dependent on how that post is perceived by users. She is consumed with watching its popularity, forgets to eat or drink, and fights her husband when he attempts to break her free from this trance. She follows the portal’s obsession with watching an ex-president be accused of sexual misconduct and describes the paranoia of trying to keep up with the “callout culture” she suspects is moving toward a place where she will be considered “bad.”
How language is used in the portal is a source of anxiety for the protagonist. She begins to realize that new slang terms, phrases, and spellings are introduced into English because “it was the way the portal wrote” (63). She uses the phrase “SHOOT IT IN MY VEINS” (65) per the portal’s expectations whenever a juxtaposition in a news headline particularly strikes her.
Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary
The protagonist helps a friend kill a possum. When they go out into the yard to get rid of the body as “There is still a real life to be lived, there are still real things to be done” (69), they find that the possum has disappeared.
The collective mind of the portal begins to weigh on the protagonist, who describes it as a “mind” that they are all stuck in. She notes that the portal was once a place for individual expression but quickly changed into a place where everyone uses similar words to discuss the same topic. She speaks about a short story that “everyone” reads at the same time, in which the textual forms of the portal (emojis, slang, social expectation) are in conversation with the metaphorical ghosts of bodies using these forms.
The protagonist spends the Christmas holidays with her parents, sister, and brother. They eat a deer that her brother killed and discuss his willingness to use his military training to protect them during an apocalypse. The protagonist's sister is pregnant, and the protagonist worries whether “English would still be intact when it came time for the baby to learn it” (75). The protagonist and her sister grew up in different cultural generations—the protagonist in the 1990s and the sister in the 2000s—which the protagonist considers to be their fundamental difference. She and her siblings discuss how strange interacting with other people has become with the influence of the portal and the increasing likelihood of dissociating from reality by obsessing over the portal.
After Christmas dinner, the siblings watch videos of Sasquatch sightings and Naked and Afraid. The protagonist considers her sister’s pregnancy a miracle and considers herself willing to sacrifice everything to keep the baby safe. While driving home, the protagonist and her husband narrowly escape an accident after their car skids on ice. The husband repeats the words “I’m sorry! I love you!” (80) so often that the protagonist experiences them as an echo in her ears long after the accident.
Part 1, Chapters 4-5 Analysis
The protagonist talks about the portal’s interest in normalizing behaviors. The word “normalize” stands in for cultural homogenization (53). The protagonist suspects that once everything becomes normalized, everything will be subject to the approval of the portal. Uniqueness, creativity, and dissenting opinions will cease to exist if everyone in the portal agrees to accept only those things that are normalized. The increasingly collective nature of the protagonist’s experience of the portal coincides with an increase in her use of the pronoun “we,” as the boundaries of her individuality are no longer easy for her to perceive.
This depersonalization causes the protagonist to worry about losing her sense of reality and connection with the real world. Though she is invested in the portal, she nevertheless craves the reassurance of human connection. These interactions are associated with “disappearances,” such as the anecdote she tells of her friend who disappeared shortly after their walk in Washington Square Park. In the short story she describes as everyone having read at the same time in the portal, users of the portal most closely identify with ghosts: “What did ghosts do, on the one night a year they were given bodies?” (72) The protagonist is losing an understanding of what her body experiences. Though everyone in the portal reads this short story, the author’s message about the threat of dissociation between body and mind does not change their behavior. They continue to interact in the portal even though the short story warns them against possibly losing a sense of their bodies and individuality. Art, whether music or writing, does not have enough of an impact on the users of the portal for them to distance themselves from it.
The protagonist’s popularity in the portal is both addictive and fleeting, causing her to devote more time and effort to crafting her posts. Increasingly, she is losing her sense of identity and approaching a collective “we” identity. Her questioning of the portal’s use of the English language, the change in her humor, and the unexplained disappearances of people she knows serve as the only characteristics separating her from the portal’s collective.
Unlock all 36 pages of this Study Guide
Get in-depth, chapter-by-chapter summaries and analysis from our literary experts.
- Grasp challenging concepts with clear, comprehensive explanations
- Revisit key plot points and ideas without rereading the book
- Share impressive insights in classes and book clubs