The Compound
49 pages • 1-hour read
Aisling RawleThe Compound
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 5-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of gender discrimination, sexual content, anti-gay bias, and animal death.
Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary
The residents realize that they are running out of food. Andrew takes charge, dividing the 16 remaining residents into eight “departments” responsible for various aspects of compound life and upkeep. He and Tom take a joint position of leadership, but Lily suspects that Tom is the true leader, using Andrew for his personable nature. Along with Becca, Lily is assigned to clean the kitchen and living room. She recalls the “Sloppy Seven,” a group of seven residents who lived in filth during their time on the show, and feels smug that her group has organized so early.
At Tom and Andrew’s urging, the group completes a series of Communal Tasks in an attempt to win food. Although they complete the tasks, none of the rewards are food. They also complete Personal Tasks: Lily dances with Jacintha for shoes, while Susie defecates by the pool for an unnamed reward. For the final Communal Task, the group climbs onto the roof of the compound, where they eat a small dinner and watch the sun set. The mood in the compound grows euphoric, and the group decides to reject a task offering pasta in exchange for banishing a resident. As they stay up late into the night, Lily chooses to believe that the connections they are making are real.
The next morning, Vanessa and Sarah divvy out small breakfasts to the group, chastising Lily and Becca for not cleaning the kitchen the night before. Lily feels a pang of jealousy when she goes to wake Becca and sees her in bed with Sam. The group completes more tasks, hoping to win food, but tensions grow as they struggle to complete the challenges and disagree about whether rewards are worthwhile. When Lily argues against completing a task involving spitting in a partner’s mouth, Ryan tries to convince her to do it by kissing her passionately. Thoughts of how they look to viewers distract her as they kiss.
That night, Sam, Ryan, and Jacintha use barbed wire and pool cleaning nets won in Communal Tasks to catch wild ducks living near the compound pool. The group cleans and cooks the ducks, and they delight in knowing that they are not wholly reliant on the producers for food. They freeze duck meat for later and gather the fat in a jar for cooking. After dinner, Susie presents each resident with a duck feather as a reminder of their achievement.
Part 1, Chapter 6 Summary
Lily, always the first to wake up, wakes Andrew the next morning as he requested. The group eats a handful of grass in exchange for a whistle and then receives a task to complete a three-legged race in exchange for nails. Mia is furious and refuses to participate, feeling that they are being mocked. Andrew begins pacing back and forth in front of the big screen that displays the Communal Tasks.
Lily overhears Seb complaining to Tom about the girls, saying that they are dressing provocatively but resisting his sexual advances. Seb suggests that the girls want sexual attention, and Tom encourages him to be a gentleman. When Seb explicitly suggests that Lily is sexually available, Tom shuts down the conversation, telling him not to talk about the girls like that. Lily feels as if Tom is standing up for her.
Lily and Jacintha have a conversation about their future in the compound. When only five residents remain, they are allowed both to discuss their personal lives and to harm each other physically, though producers intervene if someone’s life is in danger. The rewards for tasks also become more expensive. Lily is thrilled to discuss the various things she wants, but Jacintha changes the conversation, and Lily worries that she will appear shallow.
The group discovers that Seb has a secret stash of food when they find him eating strawberry jam in a secret room. Seb reveals that he does not believe that the producers will feed the group again. He explains that sometimes when he asks for specific items by name, they are offered as rewards for his Personal Tasks. Lily and the others are disgusted by Seb’s greed. Lily also feels herself pulling away from Ryan, unsure if there is any connection between them besides physical attraction.
When Seb refuses to compete in a three-legged race as a Communal Task, he is tied to Tom and forced to participate. The big screen refreshes with a new task: banish a resident in exchange for meat. Seb is immediately banished from the compound, and the rest of the group feasts on lamb for lunch. After a full day of completing tasks, the group banishes Sarah in exchange for bread so that the numbers are even and no one has to sleep alone. Vanessa locks the freezer, but the group knows that, as a result of their work, they will not have to worry about food for a long time.
Part 1, Chapter 7 Summary
The residents spend several days relaxing after the double banishment. Tom asks Lily to talk to Sam about convincing the other residents to get back on track with tasks. Lily wonders if Tom knows about her secret crush on Sam, or if he is too afraid to talk to Sam’s partner, Becca, after having forced her underwater. Lily finds Ryan working out, and the two share a passionate kiss. As Ryan begins to escalate things, Lily stops him. Although she wants to have sex with him, she worries that he is only trying to fulfil a Personal Task.
Lily shares Tom’s request with Sam, who doesn’t seem to think he’s a leader. Sam suggests a vote, and the group votes to return to the tasks, sharing their professions in exchange for a table. Lily is embarrassed to reveal that she sells makeup in a department store and worries that Sam, an architect, will like her less as a result.
One night, the group wakes to a violent crash in the house. Ryan is not in bed with Lily, and when she leaves the bedroom to find him, Sam grabs her, urging her to stay behind until they can ensure the house is safe. Tom claims that a fox ransacked the kitchen and insists that they need to return to tasks full-time to build a door. However, Lily suspects that Tom may have staged the incident. Sam reveals that a wild dog attacked Tom in the desert on the way to the compound. He urges Lily not to provoke Tom and implies that staying in the compound indefinitely isn’t worth her dignity.
The next day, the residents are tasked to banish a resident temporarily in exchange for lumber. They draw lots and banish Susie with a backpack full of food and water. Lily grows anxious about her relationship with Ryan. When Candice encourages her, lending her a dress, the women share a sexually charged moment but do not act on it, knowing that only heterosexual couples are safe in the compound. While looking for Ryan, Lily interrupts a political conversation between Sam and Becca and is embarrassed when she cannot contribute.
Ryan promises Lily that he won’t pressure her to have sex and says that he wants to be her boyfriend after they leave the compound. Although she has not thought about life after the compound, Lily agrees. Late that night, Susie returns, having been lost in the desert. She allows the residents to care for her burns and blisters but does not speak to them. The residents are rewarded with more wood than they could possibly use.
Part 1, Chapters 5-7 Analysis
In this section of the novel, Aisling Rawle builds tension through whiplash changes in tone. In Chapter 5, for instance, Lily is given a Personal Task to dance for another resident. Unsure how her dance will be perceived, she pulls her best friend Jacintha in for a dance. The girls quickly lose themselves, “laughing, dancing without inhibition” and spinning each other fast enough that “if one of [them] let go suddenly the other would go careening into the pool” (84). The dance leaves the girls so exhausted and joyous that Lily realizes she “had forgotten, even, that it was all for a task” (84). However, this euphoric moment is interrupted by the sound of Susie “wailing” for the others not to look at her. Lily immediately turns to find Susie “squatting above the ground” (84) and “shitting on the concrete” (84) with “steam rising from below her” (84). The graphic, animalistic image offers a stark contrast to Lily’s joyous dancing seconds before. Although Lily acknowledges that Susie’s public defecation “must have been for a Personal Task” (84), the scene horrifies her. The reference to the show’s tasks subtly reminds readers that Lily’s dance was also a Personal Task, suggesting that it is just as debasing as Susie’s task, and thus further contextualizing Lily’s discomfort. The disorienting change in tone mirrors Lily’s disorienting experience in the compound, where moments of joy are followed by harsh reminders of where she is and who is in control of her life.
The unnamed fictional show at the heart of The Compound is an amalgam of real-life reality romance shows like Love Island and wilderness survival shows like Survivor, highlighting The Insidious Nature of Reality TV. In Rawle’s novel, these two poles of reality television sometimes clash in ways that highlight the underlying similarities. Near the end of Chapter 5, Lily shares a passionate kiss with Ryan, whom she has been coupled up with since the beginning of their time on the show. Moments later, Lily is confused when she sees her crush, Sam, in the kitchen. When Sam asks about Ryan’s job cleaning the pool, Lily assumes he’s insulting Ryan out of jealousy: “I didn’t like the way that sounded, like [his] only job was to clean the pool” (92). These passages suggest that Lily views all her interactions through the love triangle between herself, Sam, and Ryan.
In reality, Sam is thinking about how to trap and kill ducks to feed the group and needs Ryan’s pool maintenance tools to do so. The violence of these scenes stands in apparent stark contrast to Lily’s fixation on the love triangle reality trope: Sam is transformed from the object of romance to a killing machine “as each duck [goes] from writhing and flapping to limp in his hands in the space of a second” (93). However, the violence of his actions, which are necessary for the residents’ survival, hints at a similar brutality underlying Lily’s single-minded focus on the love triangle, which is integral to her “survival” on the show. Preoccupied with this goal, she accepts various kinds of psychic harm—for instance, she contemplates having sex with Ryan to secure her position on the show and, conversely, suppresses her attraction to Candice because it does not serve her interests.
The novel underscores the parallel between the two genres of reality TV through Lily’s reaction to the butchering of the ducks. Watching Sam’s methodical “killing of innocent creatures” (93) makes him “more real” for Lily, who realizes that he is “impressive, attractive, intelligent—someone [she] realize[s] [she] like[s] a great deal” (94). The fact that Lily’s crush on Sam solidifies after seeing him take violent action to provide for the group suggests that the violence of reality shows like Survivor and the romantic tropes of shows like Love Island are inextricably connected.
The force that links the two, the novel implies, is capitalism. As the food on the compound runs out, the violence of the capitalist system becomes clear; the danger to the residents’ lives stems not from an actual lack of resources but rather from the way they are distributed (or not). Meanwhile, the show’s insistence that participants be in heterosexual relationships mirrors the association between capitalist economics and heterosexism, as only relationships with the potential to produce children (i.e., additional labor) are considered worthwhile. The show thus exists as a microcosm of capitalist society, central to the novel’s exploration of The Perpetuation of Capitalism Through Materialism and other means.
Unlock all 49 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