I'm Thinking of Ending Things

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2016

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-4

Chapters 5-7

Chapters 8-10

Chapters 11-13

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Chapters 11-13Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 11, Pages 131-156 Summary

Jake proposes they stop at Dairy Queen, assuring the protagonist they’ll have a nondairy option for her. Though the protagonist still has a headache and it has begun to snow, she agrees to stop. They arrive at a Dairy Queen a few minutes before the store closes. The protagonist notes how the ice cream machine produces a droning noise like a dial tone. Two teenage girls come out from the back room to take their orders. The girls “have different shapes, different body types, but in all other facets are identical” (134). As Jake orders two frozen lemonades, the two girls giggle and whisper together, acting as if they know Jake and the protagonist. A third girl comes out from the back room to make their frozen lemonades. The third girl is inexplicably familiar to the protagonist; she knows the third girl but does not know how. “She appears fragile and anxious. She has a rash” (135) on her arm that makes the protagonist curious about her. As the third girl hands the protagonist her frozen lemonade, she whispers that she is scared for the protagonist before quickly returning to the back room.

Jake proposes stopping at a local high school to throw out their cups and drives them down a secluded dirt road to a large high school. He leaves the protagonist in the car and finds a dumpster behind the school, noticing a black pickup truck parked nearby. The snowfall gets heavier.

When Jake returns, he and the protagonist argue whether anyone is in the school. Jake believes a janitor must be in there. The protagonist is anxious to leave now that she has “made her decision about Jake, about us” (150), but Jake stalls for time. He turns off the car and the two begin kissing. Jake calls her Steph. Jake suddenly pulls away. He saw a man standing in one of the high school’s windows watching them, and he is angry. He noticed the man wave at them. Jake becomes enraged and leaves the protagonist in the car to confront the custodian, taking the car keys with him.

Chapter 11, Pages 157-187 Summary

As the protagonist waits for Jake to return, she considers how the job of a custodian would suit her need for solitude: “Everything would be a little more natural” (158). She looks forward to decades of solitude regardless of the loneliness that may entail. Her decision is clear to her now, and she questions why she took so long to realize it.

Anxious to leave, the protagonist decides to go into the school to find Jake. Through the window she notices a tall figure wearing a gas mask and holding a mop and waits to enter the building until the figure leaves the hallway. She wanders through the halls and finds an open door leading to the janitor’s office. The room is familiar to her. There are many pictures hung on the wall depicting a man’s face, though the poor quality of the photos makes it difficult for the protagonist to see who it is. She finds a child’s shirt, which she recognizes as her own.

The protagonist runs out of the office and to the main doors, but they have been chained and locked from the inside. She looks out the window and sees that Jake’s car is gone, but the pickup is still there. She hears footsteps behind her and climbs the stairs to the second floor, looking for a place to hide. Over the loudspeakers, the same country song from the beginning of her drive with Jake begins to play on repeat. She finds a bench to hide behind. While hiding, she thinks of her mother’s friend Ms. Veal and an incident in which the protagonist believes Ms. Veal to have poisoned the cookies she gave to the protagonist’s mother. It is the scariest memory the protagonist knows.

The protagonist decides to keep searching for Jake. She finds the art room and remembers how she “didn’t want to be competent and successful in math only. Art was different” (179). She recalls her struggle with isolation and social anxiety, beginning to mix her individual identity with Jake’s memories. She finds paint on her hands and a message written on the floor that echoes the Caller’s voicemails.

The protagonist notices she has been biting her nails and tearing her hair out. She remembers the high school’s layout, finds the gym, and follows the sound of running water to the men’s locker room. She finds Jake’s clothes and shoes, wet from the shower.

Chapter 12 Summary

The protagonist’s sense of self begins to dissolve fully. She crawls through the music room with a bloody nose. “I can’t focus. I can’t keep people straight. I’m thinking about everyone” (191). Reid begins to shift from using the personal pronoun “I” to describe the protagonist to the plural “we” as the protagonist’s identity is revealed to be an aspect of Jake and Jake’s writing.

She takes the portrait from Jake’s mother out of her pocket. She recognizes the face as her own, as Jake’s, as the man who watches her, and as other figments of Jake’s mind. The chapter ends with the repeated phrase “What are you waiting for?” (194-97) printed over four pages.

Chapter 13 Summary

The protagonist, now describing herself as “we,” returns to the janitor’s office. Jake’s parents died long ago, and the mentally unstable brother Jake described is actually him. “It’s Jake. It was Jake. We’re in here together. All of us” (201). The protagonist’s identity morphs fully into that of Jake as Jake remembers what actually happened at the pub on trivia night: he chatted with an attractive girl but never saw her again.

To keep the possibility of her alive, Jake began writing about her just before his suicide, to see if through writing he could have made their relationship work out. However, Jake’s sense of loneliness prevailed, and he made the decision to end things through the act of writing about this unknown woman. As Jake reveals the truth behind these thoughts, he returns fully to himself: “A single unit, back to one. Only me. Jake. Alone again” (207). Stabbing himself with a metal hanger and bleeding out in the janitor’s office, Jake dies by suicide.

At the end of the chapter, the Speakers discuss the nature of Jake’s writing. One Speaker suggests to the other that they must read the writing from the end instead of the beginning to understand the story.

Chapters 11-13 Analysis

At the Dairy Queen, young Jake and the protagonist encounter three girls. Two behave strangely, giggling and whispering to each other near young Jake. The way these girls behave comments on Jake’s struggle with social anxiety and judgment. They are the embodiment of his fears when interacting with other people; he is afraid he will be laughed at, ridiculed, or he will in some way distinguish himself as an outsider. These two girls are described as different yet identical, which is a contradiction that supports their characterization as additional figments of Jake’s mental identity.

This fear of a seemingly ordinary life finds its foundation in the story of Ms. Veal, which is recounted by the protagonist as the boundaries of her sense of self begin to blur while in the high school. Jake’s social anxiety and suspicion of relationships is explained through this childhood memory, in which he believes a trusted family friend inexplicably causes harm to his mother. Jake is frightened although “it’s just life” (172), and “If it was harder to perceive or accept, if there was more room for doubt, I would be less scared” (182). For him, ill intentions and unknowability lie underneath every person’s actions. Without knowing another person’s thoughts, the other person can never be fully trusted, as exemplified by Ms. Veal giving his mother poisoned cookies.

It is this realization of the unknowability of another person that causes the protagonist—and therefore Jake—to make the decision to kill himself. Because young Jake acts so unexpectedly in the car outside the high school, the protagonist is shocked into accepting that she will never fully know this other person. The decision to kill himself corresponds to the decision that thoughts are the only reliable reality; through this writing experiment, Jake has realized any relationship he could have imagined with Steph or the woman from the pub would have involved being with a person he could never fully know. Their actions, then, imply a certain degree of falsehood and inevitable separation, which solidifies Jake’s decision to kill himself. This is reflected over the course of the narrative, as the protagonist’s main worry about whether to end things with young Jake is her guilt over not sharing this thought with him.

At the moment of Jake’s death, Reid combines the figments of Jake’s identity and the characters of his writing into the singular Jake. Their purpose was to help him decide whether to kill himself and having reached a decision, Jake allows himself to become one with all of them. The novel ends on the same discussion of ipseity as in the beginning, which in itself represents the novel’s other theme of the circularity of time. Here, Reid lets the novel’s narrative structure itself discuss the very concepts that its character Jake used to make his decision.