55 pages • 1-hour read
The Last Graduate
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Themes
Coming of Age Without Adults
In The Last Graduate, the students lack of access to adults proves to be a crucial aspect of their coming-of-age journey, for the Scholomance is a place where the students must utilize the lessons of the school itself, along with interactions between peers and alliances, to decide who they want to be in life. The school itself forces students to mature by presenting them with life-and-death decisions on a daily basis. No one can rely on parents or enclaves to serve as a buffer between them and the voracious mals. In such a setting, the students learn harsh lessons about adulthood, for they know that a single mistake could be fatal.
While education is a key element in coming of age, Novik creates an extremely ominous version of the scholastic world. At its best, education is an intentional process designed by wiser mentors in order to prepare students for life as adults. In the Scholomance, however, there are no adults to act as guides, and there is no intention behind the process other than the ultimate struggle to survive graduation. The knowledge and rewards that students gain are presented as largely arbitrary, as when El finds the book of the Golden Stone sutras by accident and receives an award for neglecting her other studies to focus on translating the sutras from Sanskrit to English. In this way, the school itself plays the role of a pseudo-adult by imposing some form of order on the student body; however, it primarily acts as a bystander, watching for mistakes or momentary lapses in attention and creating punitive scenarios that often lead to the deaths of erring students.
In the absence of adults and authority figures, students must learn life lessons directly from each other, whether their peers are allies or rivals. For example, El’s reliance on Liu and Aadhya teaches her that human connection can be a good survival strategy and a source of strength. Aadhya in particular constantly counsels El to rely on others, to ask for help, and to be more strategic about her decisions. A prime example of this dynamic occurs when she advises El not to let her romantic feelings for Orion damage her alliance’s ability to survive.
Finally, students rely on the lessons that they have learned outside of the Scholomance. El frequently has cause to reflect on her mother’s advice about power and selflessness. For example, El chooses to help the wounded Cora with a healing spell rather than leaving the girl to die in the graduation hall. El therefore demonstrates the wisdom to understand when and how best to use her knowledge, and this facet of her personality drives her decision to save everyone in the school. Under her leadership, the students of the Scholomance utilize their hard-won survival tactics in a collective effort to survive.
The Moral Implications of Survival Tactics
Over the course of the novel, the student body—and El in particular—change their perceptions of the moral implications of their survival tactics. The world both within and beyond the Scholomance encourages self-interest in the name of survival, and some students are even willing to sacrifice others in order to ensure that they will live to see another day. El, for example, initially refuses to tell the first-years in the seminar room where the safest spots are because she knows that they will make good cannon fodder for any mals that may attack; this strategy will allow her to escape much more easily.
However, under the influence of her mother’s gentler, ethical ethos, El quickly chooses to risk herself for the sake of others. She therefore attacks the vipersac and saves the first-years, including the privileged enclaver Sudarat, even though she knows that her actions will put her at risk. As time goes on, El slowly comes to question the moral implications of prioritizing self-interest. When she uses La Main de la Mort, a spell that could destroy everyone and everything around her, she recognizes that her power is a privilege that requires her to take responsibility for the welfare of others. By contrast, Orion recklessly hunts and kills mals without thinking through the implications of his actions for the student body as a whole, and his wild attacks on the malicious predators sometimes cause additional dangers for bystanders. His only goal is to kill mals and gain mana for his enclave.
After watching Khamis risk himself to save Nyoko, El recognizes that her own solution to the problem—destroying the machinery of the gym—would have made it virtually impossible for other alliances to practice for the ravages of the graduation hall. In this moment, she realizes that her power requires her to consider the needs of others. She reasons that if the system of the Scholomance is broken, she and others who are privileged with power must work to change that system for the better. In the final analysis, El embraces an altruistic decision-making process in which strategies that lead to everyone’s safety must take precedence.
The Tension Between Individualism and Collectivism
Novik explores many different facets of the tension between individualism and collectivism, and El’s character development is central to this theme. Initially no more than a self-interested loner, El eventually becomes a leader who is willing to risk her life for others. From the very beginning, El is conflicted about whether to act alone to work for the good of everyone.
In the first chapter of the novel, El makes the decision to protect the first-years from the vipersac, thereby working on behalf of others rather than just for herself. That she is still conflicted about the relationship between her individual needs and the needs of the collective is apparent in her subsequent regret over expending mana to help others. Her ambivalence over her own actions reflects her awareness that altruistic behavior on behalf of the collective is costly and can be detrimental to individual survival.
However, El moves past this ambivalence when she rejects enclaver politics, condemning the fact that the enclaves engage in collective action that nonetheless prioritizes the needs of a small, powerful elite. El eventually comes to realize that the problem with enclaves involves their narrow view of collectivism and their insistence upon hoarding mana. In Chapter 7, for example, El makes a decisive move toward this broader collectivism when she recruits non-enclavers as members of her alliance. A powerful act of collectivism occurs when she and her group recruit Jowani, an indie student whose only contribution has been reading encouraging poems. El and the others in her alliance select him because they know he will not survive the hall otherwise, and they willingly overlook the pragmatic risks of including a less skilled wizard. As El notes, teams that make decisions based on friendship and personal attachments are less likely to make it through graduation. Even so, she willingly supports the recruitment of Jowani.
El’s most decisive embrace of collective action comes with her decision to fix the Scholomance itself. Instead of merely rejecting enclaver power and saving individual students like Jowani, El uses her abilities to institute a systemic change that challenges the Darwinian approach to survival. Instead, she wants to help the school be “something besides a lesser evil” (298).
The final scene in the graduation hall stands as the ultimate showdown between an individualist ethos and a collectivist stance. Orion believes that he alone can defeat Patience. To the end, he embraces the individualistic model of heroism, in which everything depends on the will of one person. He can see no future in which he relies on others. As a result, he embraces the near-certain risk of death by choosing to face the enormous mal alone. By contrast, El chooses otherwise, and her actions reflect her awareness that individuals grow stronger when they engage in collective action.
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