48 pages • 1-hour read
The Business Trip
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.
Symbols & Motifs
Income Inequality
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death.
The novel suggests that Jasmine’s violence is related to income inequality in the US. When she meets Stephanie on the plane to Denver, Jasmine’s first thought is “of the unfairness of life” (204). She questions why Stephanie is able “to jet around the country in lovely clothes when it took [her] over a year to save up enough for just this one flight” (204). Although Stephanie and Jasmine are both flying in economy, and Stephanie’s trip is paid for by her work, Jasmine assumes that Stephanie belongs to a different economic class.
Jasmine keenly feels the disparity between herself and Stephanie when she watches Stephanie check in to a luxurious hotel while she checks into a cheap motel. Jasmine compares the pen and paper at her motel to the ones at Stephanie’s hotel: At Stephanie’s hotel, “the pen [i]s heavy, the paper thick. It fe[els] important when you [a]re writing” (283). At Jasmine’s motel, on the other hand, the pen “[i]s a Bic ballpoint that look[s] as if someone had chewed the end of it,” and “the paper [i]s of a thin, almost scratchy quality” (283). Jasmine interprets the difference as “just another way the class system in America reward[s] people like Stephanie, Trent, Allison, and Drake and care[s] little about people like [her]” (283). For Jasmine, the small luxuries afforded to Stephanie as a member of the professional class justify Jasmine’s violence against her.
Mexico
Mexico appears throughout the novel as a symbol of freedom and happiness for Jasmine and Stephanie. When Jasmine first learns of the Mexican port town of Puerto Escondido as a high school student, she is fascinated by “how the town nestle[s] up against the ocean, picturing a white sand beach and endless sun” (220). For Jasmine, the appeal of Mexico is that “it couldn’t be further from Madison, Wisconsin, in [her] mind or from the nightmares that still ke[ep] [her] up at night” (220). Although she remains in Madison into adulthood, Jasmine never lets go of the dream of Mexico. Jasmine sees Mexico as the only place where she can experience “true freedom.”
Stephanie also sees Mexico as a place where she can be free of responsibilities and truly happy. Feeling stifled by her boring life in Madison, Stephanie “ha[s] been dreaming of just running off, starting a whole fresh and invigorating world for [her]self in Mexico, getting out of the news business and retiring to a life of wine and good books” (28). Stephanie believes that moving to Mexico might also improve her relationship with her adult son, reasoning that he might “want to visit [her] just to be living at [her] beach shack, checking out the girls down at the surf” (28). For Stephanie, Mexico offers the opportunity to live her best life.
Social Media
In the novel, social media sites such as Facebook and Instagram suggest that modern connections are shallow and insignificant. Both Stephanie and Jasmine plan to take advantage of social media in order to convince Stephanie’s friends and coworkers that she is still at the conference. Stephanie hires a look-alike actress to impersonate her at the conference and writes down all her social media passwords so that the actress “c[an] make sure everyone back home th[ink] [she] [i]s at the conference by sending pictures to [her] Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and Twitter accounts” (330). Stephanie’s and Jasmine’s identical plans for duplicity—convincing people that Stephanie is somewhere that she isn’t—further indicate how they are doppelgangers.
Stephanie believes that social media posts can act as proof of life, suggesting that her relationships may be surface level. This is bolstered by how Jasmine tricks Stephanie’s friends into thinking that she is alive. After Jasmine kills the actress acting as Stephanie, she posts a photo from the conference on Facebook that successfully fools Stephanie’s friends. Despite the fact that the sterile post does not contain a picture of Stephanie, her neighbor Robert “like[s] it and add[s] a comment wishing her a good trip” (55). Stephanie’s work colleagues are also fooled by the post, arguing that she couldn’t have gone missing because “she posted on Facebook from the conference last week” (96). This implies that Stephanie’s relationships in Madison are largely shallow.
Unlock the meaning behind every key symbol & motif
See how recurring imagery, objects, and ideas shape the narrative.
- Explore how the author builds meaning through symbolism
- Understand what symbols & motifs represent in the text
- Connect recurring ideas to themes, characters, and events