Arcadia

“Over Abe’s shoulder, far atop the hill, the heaped brick shadow of Arcadia House looms. In the wind, the tarps over the rotted roof suck against the beams and blow out, a beast’s panting belly. The half-glassed windows are open mouths, the full-glassed are eyes fixed on Bit. He looks away.”

The Arcadia House, a dilapidated mansion, provides a juxtaposition to Arcadia’s otherwise idyllic framing. In this quote, the mansion is described as an unnerving beast, a use of symbolism that reveals Arcadia is not as it seems.

“For a hello, Hannah rests her cheek in the crook of Abe’s neck for a moment and kisses Bit gently on the forehead. Like a sigh into breath, life releases into life. Hannah turns to stoke the woodstove. Abe fixes the drafty chink where he had built the lean-to against the Bread Truck. They eat dinner and Abe plays a tune on the harmonica and when night falls all three curl on the pallet together, and Bit sleeps, a hickory nut within the shell of his parents.”

This quote captures the intimacy of Bit’s family. Arcadia is a setting that encourages autonomy so radical that these ties are not necessarily honored. However, this quote highlights the humanity of family, especially in the upbringing of a child whose physical and emotional safety rely on their parents. Bit fits in with his parents like a hickory nut in a shell; this simile emphasizes the importance of parental protection.

“[A] few goodies from the Outside—pink coconut cake in cellophane or peppermints like bloodshot eyes—despite the ban on sugar and the harm surely done to animals in making the goodies. Bit believes the treats’ chemical afterburn is what the world beyond Arcadia must taste like.”

Titus’s snacks for Bit indicate that the world outside of Arcadia has something to offer Bit. He has no idea what the Outside is like, so these treats symbolize a hypothetical universe made real through taste. This quote also emphasizes the strict rules of Arcadia.

“Live with the land, not on it. Live outside the evil of commerce and make our own lives from scratch. Let our love be a beacon to light up the world.”

Part of Arcadia’s ethos is to live in harmony with nature, not against it as modern society does. This mindset emphasizes the residents’ empathy for living beings. They want to break ties with consumerism, which is admirable in theory, but deceptive in practice.

“Now the children make a game of scanning the underbrush for their tiny friend. Often someone runs shouting back to the Kid Herd, sure that they’ve seen Petey from the corner of an eye, rosy as a lump of flesh, swift in the brambles, a creature miraculous and tender, their shared secret.”

Arcadia’s dedication to treating animals as free creatures and not as food or entertainment is admirable, but can go against a child’s empathic nature. In this quote, the children pretend to keep a pet rabbit, despite knowing Arcadia’s rule.

“Language has begun to shift in Bit. There are small explosions of comprehension every day. He remembers last August, when he lay in the sun-warmed shallows of the Pond while under the water he was nibbled by things unseen. With his Grimm book, it is as if he has his eyes below the surface and can at last see the tiny fish there.”

Bit’s old copy of Brothers Grimm fairy tales helps develop his language, his autonomy. This quote highlights the importance of reading and storytelling as ways of conceptualizing the world.

“He sees it clearly, now, how time is flexible, a rubber band. It can stretch long and be clumped tight, can be knotted and folded over itself, and all the while it is endless, a loop. There will be night and then morning, and then night again. The year will end, another one will begin, will end. An old man dies, a baby is born.”

Through Bit, Lauren Groff highlights childhood development. He experiences important revelations as he observes the world. Thus, this quote emphasizes a child’s mind at work, the growth that comes with age and experience.

“The world is sometimes too much for Bit, too full of terror and beauty. Every day he finds himself squeezed under a new astonishment. The universe pulses outward at impossible speeds. Bit feels its spin into nothing. Beyond Arcadia hulk the things he has dreamed of: museums, steel towers, pools, zoos, theaters, oceans full of strange creatures.”

Bit continues to discover more about the world: His curiosity allows him to see new things and people as both terrible and beautiful. This quote demonstrates how curious he is about the Outside in particular.

“He keeps his deepest belief tight to him: that people are good and want to be good, if only you give them a chance. This is the most magnificent thing about Arcadia, he knows. It is the shell that protects them.”

Having only known Arcadia his whole life, Bit believes in his community even when it’s at its worst. Arcadia has instilled in him values and love. He believes people are inherently good, which is a moral stance that keeps him empathetic. Arcadia gives people second chances, but this idyllic vision is destroyed by reality—but even so, Bit doesn’t give up on people.

“Whatever, says the fox-faced boy, it’s all bullshit. Handy goes on about equality and subverting the hegemony, but Arcadia’s no different from anywhere else. You all are up on your hill. We’re down here in the mud. I’ve been here for a year and a half. If that’s nonhierarchical, or even fucking respectful, I’ll eat my own ass.”

Arcadia needs newcomers to grow and sustain the community. However, these outsiders can also bring dangers. In this quote, a newcomer critiques Arcadia in a way that Bit wouldn’t think of as a lifelong member. This outside perspective reveals Arcadia’s hypocrisy and foreshadows its downfall: Handy is a leader who doesn’t do anything, which violates Arcadia’s ethos of equality.

“It doesn’t have to be as perfect as it had been in the brief pulse of a vision. He knows that a longing for perfection is the hole in the dam that can let everything pour out.”

This quote about the impossibility of perfection explains why Arcadia ultimately fails. Bit’s fantasy of Helle is colored by love, as is Arcadia itself. Perfection is impossible, making its pursuit self-destructive.

“Childhood is such a delicate tissue; what they had done this morning could snag somewhere in the little ones, make a dull, small pain that will circle back again and again, and hurt them in small ways for the rest of their lives.”

This quote evokes Bit’s terrible and beautiful childhood. It cautions the reader to be careful with children, to provide structure and stability, as trauma can become a cycle in the future.

“Abe says, both Satan and Eliot are backing up the same sort of idea, that desiring change is a powerful way of making change; that change unfolds from this desire.”

Groff references John Milton’s Paradise Lost and George Eliot’s works to connect the false mythology of Arcadia to stories of greed. This quote highlights that change, born of greed or otherwise, only happens with desire. Change requires acknowledgement of the need for change, which doesn’t always happen in a place as myth-driven as Arcadia.

“He is glad Helle can’t see his face. He is crying. Not because of the police, not for the dead boy, not for all the people he loves being yanked, bewildered, away. For Helle, for her thievery of Arcadia’s future, for what he remembers of the night before, the men in the leather jackets.”

On Cockaigne Day, Helle is pressured into sex, which indicates the danger of leaving children unsupervised. Though Bit doesn’t know how to articulate it, his guilt over Helle is due to knowing Arcadia’s ethos is to blame. Helle is not thought of as a child in need of guidance, but an individual who can do what she wants with her body. However, this isn’t empowerment, but neglect.

“There is so little to Bit: a fine hem of gold hair, the filthy neck of a teeshirt. Fragile, pale flesh over a sharpness of bone, and eyes so vast in his face they threaten to swallow the world just now spinning past, threaten to be swallowed by it.”

Bit is characterized by his smallness. His nickname “Bit” highlights his stature, and his stature is further emphasized by the grandiosity of the Outside: He is literally small in comparison to the larger world, but also metaphorically small because he is inexperienced. This juxtaposition creates tension.

“He had liberated a red lightbulb from a photography store and stolen cash from Hannah for the chemicals, and only in the half-light of his improvised darkroom, watching the world emerge on a piece of white paper, did he feel his old self stirring. He could control this world. He could create tiny windows he could fit between his hands and study until he began to understand them.”

This quote frames photography as a symbol of control and compartmentalization. Leaving Arcadia is traumatic for Bit, and he handles his trauma by finding a way to create smaller narratives out of the larger world. In this, art has the power to manage stress.

“Amenable Bit, good-hearted Bit, gentle and generous Bit. He hates that man. Wishes he’d had any kind of backbone, the guts to say No. If he had, she would still be here. If he were more commanding, he would not be a person people would leave.”

Bit is characterized by empathy, but this quality oppresses him because he spends his life taking care of others. In this quote, he regrets not asserting his own needs, wondering if doing so would have saved him heartbreak.

“It leaves him breathless at times, how much faith people put in one another. So fragile, the social contract: we will all stand by the rules, move with care and gentleness, invest in the infrastructure, agree with the penalties of failure.”

This quote frames human society as a paradox of fragility and strength. There are many forces that can easily destroy human society, including humans themselves and their insistence on rules (that may or may not be flawed). This is true in both secluded societies like Arcadia and larger societies like American cities.

“It isn’t important if the story was ever true. Bit manipulates images: he knows stories don’t need to be factual to be vital. He understands, with a feeling inside him like a wind whipping through a room, that when we lose the stories we have believed about ourselves, we are losing more than stories, we are losing ourselves.”

Arcadia is a testament to the power of storytelling. The Arcadian myths that informed Bit’s childhood follow him through adulthood. His good memories overpower bad memories of Arcadia, as these stories are key to his identity.

“If Abe were here, Bit might throttle him dead again: what appears to be sorrow is rage. Abe was bedrock; Abe was his world’s gravity; since Bit could remember, his father was his one sure thing.”

Abe’s death by suicide is a turning point, as Bit has long relied on his father as a stable presence. He loves his mother, but her depression sometimes makes interactions difficult, and people like Helle have come in and out of his life. Abe’s death is therefore a “betrayal” to him, who is both mourning the loss and angered by it.

“Now the Pond is forlorn, with its lifeguard chair overturned on imported sand. A kickbuoy between two rocks makes a sad thumping sound in the wind-driven waves. Bit thinks of another man at another pond, long ago; the way Thoreau saw the moon looming over fresh-plowed fields and knew the earth was worthy to inhabit.”

In this quote, Groff captures the beauty of nature in its peace and wildness. Ironically, free of humans, Arcadia becomes more livable. This emphasizes the ways in which humans destroy the very planet from which they require resources.

“We watched with horror! Naked people, drugs, loud music! You were like babies, you could do nothing. You didn’t know how to plow a field. But we couldn’t let you starve. Eventually, we had a meeting and agreed to help enough to feed you, but let you disintegrate on your own. And when you did, there were some of us who felt very smart. Too much freedom, it rots things in communities, quick. That was the problem with your Arcadia.”

Gloria, an Amish librarian, provides an outsider’s perspective of Arcadia. In this quote, she clarifies Bit’s childhood idealism. Because Arcadia championed radical autonomy, lack of structure led to their demise, with children nearly dying because the adults didn’t realize how unequipped they were to run a commune.

“So strange, however: with her body leaving, her soul is rising to the surface. There is fire there, he sees. An ecstasy. He hurts with recognition: where has he seen this before? The answer comes to him in the night. In his knowledge-drunk youth in the college library, the lonely section of art books, the giving spread of them, the lustful dizzied colors. The faces of the saints.”

In this quote, Hannah is compared to saints who died in their own myths. Hannah is equally strong but fallible. The quote celebrates her despite her flaws, which reflects Bit’s love and fear for her wellbeing.