The Compound

“The sight of the desert gave me pause; I had seen it before on the television, of course, but it was a different thing entirely to see it before me.”

The novel’s opening pages establish that Lily is very familiar with the show she’s competing on and the compound where it is filmed. The phrase “of course” suggests that the show is ubiquitous in her culture. However, this passage also suggests that Lily’s familiarity with the compound makes seeing it in person even more jarring: Apparent familiarity makes it seem unfamiliar, highlighting both the artificiality of reality TV and the way reality TV derealizes actual reality. The passage thus helps introduce the theme of The Insidious Nature of Reality TV.

“I didn’t bother to examine the room to see where the cameras might be. I more or less acted as I had on the outside—with the assumption that we were all being watched in some way or another.”

Lily suggests that her life in the compound, where she is being filmed and watched by a national audience, is not that different from her life on the outside, where she is also constantly being watched. This early connection between the compound and the real world anchors the novel’s satire of modern life, where video phones and the internet can make any moment viral and where governments and corporations collect data on individuals’ habits, desires, and identities.