Hide

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 1

Chapters 2-3

Chapters 4-5

Chapters 6-7

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

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Themes

The Long-Term Impact of Trauma

Content Warning: This section discusses murder and death, suicide, trauma and PTSD, and racism.

Several of the novel’s protagonists have experienced extreme trauma, and the echoes of their pasts continue to influence their lives in the present. A prime example of this dynamic can be found in Mack herself, for she is the sole survivor of her father’s massacre of her entire family, and she now struggles to overcome her guilt over failing to save her younger sister. The hide-and-seek competition is very triggering for her because her father killed the family during a game of hide-and-seek. When she and Ava initially hear someone searching for them, she weeps, and Ava has to cover her mouth to keep her from screaming. Though Mack tries to reassure herself by saying, “It’s just a game,” she “knows it [i]sn’t the idea of losing that fill[s] her with existential terror. It [i]s the idea of being found. And then dying” (68). In addition to causing her to freeze up in key moments, her trauma also affects her entire life, and she repeatedly thinks that she “wants to be invisible, wants to be underestimated, wants to be unseen” (15). In a sense, she has never left the hiding place in which she survived her father’s massacre, and on a deeper level, her survivor’s guilt also compels her to long for death, seeing it as “that last, final, ultimate hiding place, the darkness in which no one could ever find her. Not her father, not her guilt or her shame, not hunger or fear or want” (225). Throughout the novel, she struggles to move past her guilt and shame so that she can form meaningful connections and live a fuller life.

Mack’s deep trauma is complemented by Ava’s as the two form an intense bond and a pragmatic alliance based on the need to survive. Ava is deeply affected by war-related trauma, having lost her lover and sustained an injury during her military deployment, and she still experiences PTSD-related flashbacks to that moment. Additionally, when she is confronted with the danger of the park, her instincts take over, and she tries to protect Mack. Seeing this, Mack realizes that she “isn’t the only one who brought more than a duffel bag’s worth of trauma with her into the park” (64). Notably, despite Ava’s aggression at that moment, she also sometimes freezes when confronted with violence. For example, both she and Mack hide when they hear Rebecca screaming, and they try to imagine that it is just a prank. Instead of taking action to help, as LeGrand does, they “both stay where they are, trapped in the prison of silence left in the wake of an unanswered scream” (82). The prison imagery emphasizes the fact that both women are trapped by their past trauma and will be unable to move forward unless they can come to terms with what happened to them.

The Horrors of Poverty in a Classist Society

The heirs of Asterion maintain their life of wealth and comfort by sacrificing people whom they consider beneath them, especially those who are from a lower socioeconomic class. These sacrifices mark the heirs as truly monstrous since they manipulate and use other people while living their own lives in ease and comfort. This dynamic is most aptly rendered when Mack reflects on the hideous park “that housed a monster that fed on youth and hope and stalled dreams. That ground up vulnerable people so the ones in power could keep their power, could keep their safety, could keep everything” (236). In this moment, she realizes that Linda and the others have used “vulnerable” people as fodder for the beast, which “ground” them up like a byproduct while Linda and the other families continued to enjoy the ill-gotten benefits of power and wealth.

During their visit to the Nicely family home, Mack is especially struck by the contrast between her life and Linda’s. She and the other contestants risk everything for the competition and are even afraid to leave when the violence begins because they all admit that they need the prize money. They are “desperate, lured by the promise of finally winning something,” and as a result, the “people who already had everything would continue having exactly what they already had […] [and] what they felt was their due” (228). When Mack looks at the furniture in Linda’s home, she sees how out of place she and the others are in this upper-class setting. In this moment, Mack sees herself as a “ghost of a reflection in the glass of the hutch” that guards “china that [she] could never touch, could never use, could never have” (212). This strategic description indicates that Mack is a “ghostly,” transient presence—somehow rendered less by the materialistic richness of Linda’s world. More importantly, the passage indicates that Mack and those like her are not fully real to Linda, who sees the contestants as meaningless sacrifices rather than as human beings. For Linda, the impoverished contestants are forgettable and disposable; she believes that they deserve to be discarded simply because they are not members of her social class.

Initially, the Asterion families tried to sacrifice one of their maids, Doreen, but the monster refused her. As Hobart Keck writes in his journal, “We let Doreen flee, because she does not matter, which is why it is so maddening that she could not be the sacrifice” (113). In the view of the Asterion residents, Doreen didn’t “matter” because of her race and lower social class, and Hobart’s throwaway comment displays the true depths of his depravity and callousness. This issue is compounded when he concludes that the solution is to reach into the branches of the family tree and invite “distant relations, bastard offspring, feeble cousins, shameful secrets hidden no longer” (113). Though the sacrifices are still technically blood relations, they are indelibly marked by poverty and mistreatment in the eyes of the Asterion families and would never be considered to be “properly” part of the family.

The Necessity of Hope

Though Hide deals with violence and darkness, it is also a novel deeply concerned with the idea of hope. White’s narrative makes the argument that hope is a necessity not just for human survival but for flourishing. One of the truly monstrous aspects of Asterion’s plan is the way that it weaponizes hope. All the contestants enter because they are “hopeful souls” who have been “lured by the promise of finally winning something” (228); the masterminds of the scheme therefore exploit the participants’ desperate hope for a better life. Although some contestants die by suicide rather than allowing the monster to kill them, the rest rally around the steadfast hope of winning. For Brandon, the hope is more personal; he is sustained by the idea that his father might love him and want to be with him. When his father calls him, Brandon cannot help but feel “that old lure of happiness, that old twist of hope. That hook cast into the water, snagging him” (165-66). Given the narrative’s cynical portrayal of hope as a lure or trap, the architects of Asterion clearly understand that hope will sustain and lure people in when despair and resignation will not.

However, not all the novel’s portrayals of hope are steeped in despair or futility. For Mack, regaining hope for the future allows her to survive the ravages of the park, and her shifting attitude on this topic also showcases her inner growth. Initially, Mack struggles to imagine having any kind of future at all and sees death as something restful, imagining it as “that last, final, ultimate hiding place, the darkness in which no one could ever find her. Not her father, not her guilt or her shame, not hunger or fear or want” (225). From this bleak perspective, death seems like a welcome form of oblivion, and she has no reason to imagine a better future. However, her new bonds with LeGrand, Ava, and Brandon compel her to gradually change her mind. Suddenly, she contrasts her “super-compacted” and repressed former self with the details of her recent experiences, and she finds a new form of strength in the knowledge that “[s]he’s not alone anymore, and […] her friends, her Ava, won’t leave her” (225-26). When she begins to tire during the chase with the monster during the novel’s climax, she imagines her friends and finds the will to free herself from her predicament, taking a huge leap “suspended by hope and fear and desperation and something, at last, like peace” (234). In these final scenes, Mack’s change of heart allows her to enact a plan to free herself and her friends from the park, and she also holds a new sense of hope in her own future. Although she begins the novel longing for oblivion, she gains a loving found family and is ultimately buoyed by the belief that they can have a better future together.