43 pages • 1 hour read
Blake CrouchRecursion
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Book 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Book 5
Chapter Summary: “BARRY - April 16, 2019”
Barry gains consciousness sitting next to Helena in the desert. They failed to erase the chair. The world will remember it today. Barry remembers this lifetime. They met in a bar, fell in love, and got married. Helena told him about the chair, and they rebuilt it. The news is full of mass suicides and political upheaval. Helena is going to try again.
Soldiers arrive at their house. Helena gets in the tank, flatlining as a grenade destroys the door.
The timeline shifts to another version of the day. They are in Denver, and they were unsuccessful again. An emergency alert warns of incoming missiles. The time shifts have been viewed as war acts. A missile decimates their home, but the lab survives. They send Helena back.
The timeline shifts. They’re in Maine. They were unsuccessful again. They send Helena back.
The timeline shifts. Helena never came to find Barry. He married Julia and became a detective. Barry calls Jee-woon and asks about undoing dead memories. Jee-woon confirms Slade managed this once, but he doesn’t know how.
The timeline shifts. Barry wakes up with Helena in Scotland. They were unsuccessful again. They send her back.
The timeline shifts. They’re in California, and they have Slade captive. Helena goes to her lab. Slade tells Barry that if they return to the original timeline and stop Slade from killing Helena, they will undo the dead memories. Barry runs to tell Helena, but she’s already flatlining.
The timeline shifts. Barry is in a facility in Antarctica. A video of Helena is on the TV, saying she’s dead. Barry remembers trying, over and over, to go back and save her. On the news, missiles strike America.
Six months later, Barry attempts suicide with oxycodone. Suddenly, he remembers Slade’s instructions to return to November 5, 2018 and stop him from killing Helena. Barry maps a memory of Meghan’s birthday on November 4th, 2018.
Chapter Summary: “BARRY”
In the tank, Barry sees his dead memories. Moments of his life flash by him, all the way back to his earliest memory of being a baby. He forces himself to return to the memory of the cafe on Meghan’s birthday. The memory becomes vibrant, and he finds himself in that moment.
Book 5 Analysis
Book Five carries a sense of extreme exhaustion, as the characters try to accomplish a single goal with very little success over hundreds of years. This exhaustion is reflected particularly in Helena, as the character who is tasked with reliving her life multiple times. Helena bears the marks of this demand both physically and emotionally: her red hair turns prematurely white from stress, and over the course of a few lifetimes, she becomes less warm with Barry and is more prone to irritability and frustration.
Despite this, Barry and Helena still love each other deeply. Their romantic storyline reaches its peak in this section. Barry repeatedly tells Helena that he wants to be with her no matter what, and he is prepared to fight and work alongside her for as long as it takes to come up with a solution to the fractured timelines. After Helena tries living through a timeline in which she and Barry never meet, she returns, affirming that they need one another.
Although Book Five centers on Helena’s actions and her progression as a character, it is told exclusively from Barry’s perspective. Limiting the perspective means many details of Helena’s various lives don’t appear, which makes it possible to quickly summarize hundreds of years of action. This choice also pushes Barry and his love for Helena to the emotional center of the novel. While Book Five is full of action, it also importantly communicates the emotional and mental toll Helena and Barry experience.
Thematically, this section explores the numerous ways a life can unfurl, and how small decisions can lead to major changes. Each alternate timeline results in a completely new life for Barry and Helena, who live, at different points, in the desert, by the sea, and in Antarctica. Being together utterly changes each of their lives, as does every individual choice they make as a couple.
One of the major themes of Recursion is grief. In Book Five, Barry’s grief transforms into acceptance, and finding peace with death becomes another critical theme. Barry accepts both Helena’s death and the death of the world as he knows it, guided by Helena’s reminder that if linear time is an illusion, nothing that he misses has really disappeared. It is only after Barry makes peace with death that he realizes he can still stop Slade in the original timeline.
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By Blake Crouch
