49 pages • 1 hour read
Gordon KormanThe Hypnotists
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Jax considers the Third Avenue bus evil as it pulls away from the stop, leaving him and his basketball teammate, Tommy, behind. Now they will be late for their championship game. Another bus comes, but it doesn’t stop. When the next bus comes, Jax stands in the road waving it down. For a moment, he has a vision of himself as if watching from the driver’s perspective. The bus stops for them, and Jax tells him to get them to 96th Street as soon as possible.
The bus takes off and starts ignoring other passengers’ stop requests. Soon the bus is speeding and weaving, causing accidents and tossing around the passengers. The bus screeches to a halt at 96th Street. The bus driver seems unaware of what just happened.
Jax and Tommy run to their basketball game just in time.
Chapter 2 Summary
Coach Knapp sends the boys to the locker room to suit up. Jax notices his eyes are blue and imagines they must have been purple on the bus as he believes stress causes them to change color. Tommy never notices because he is colorblind.
Jax heads on the court, nervous to face off against the opposing team’s star player, Rodney Steadman. As he waits for the tip-off, he has another vision of himself as if from Rodney’s perspective. Jax wonders if he is having an out-of-body experience. Jax tries to trash-talk Rodney, accusing Rodney of being scared. Rodney plays strangely, as if in slow motion. He scores far less than usual and seems afraid of Jax. The game is close with Jax’s team up by one. Rodney is about to score when Jax fouls him. Now he has two free-throw opportunities. Jax has another vision and tells Rodney to miss. He misses. Jax and his team win the championship. He feels split into two perspectives, one celebrating and the other feeling strangely bummed.
Chapter 3 Summary
Jax’s dad, Ashton, speeds through New York in his Bentley to get to his son. He parks the car illegally knowing people will assume the owner has clout, though Ashton just works at a Bentley dealership. Jax’s parents arrive at the eye doctor’s office in a chaotic scene as people run away and the nurses restrain the doctor. Over hot chocolate, Jax explains that he told the doctor to leave him alone, and the doctor began tackling anyone who entered the room. The doctor didn’t even have an explanation for Jax’s color-changing eyes. Ashton assures Jax that the color-changing runs in the family and shouldn’t affect him. Jax admits that he has been having strange visions. His mom tells him not to worry.
Chapter 4 Summary
Jax’s parents send him to Dr. Gundenberg, an expensive psychiatrist. Dr. Gundenberg wants to talk about Jax’s dreams. He does not believe that Jax is truly seeing himself from another perspective and analyzes it as a manifestation of him not knowing who he is. Jax gets angry. He feels himself having another vision and tells the doctor to jump out the window in a play for attention. Dr. Gundenberg starts climbing out the window. Jax tries to pull him back in. He shouts for him to stop and the doctor steps back in. After the episode, Dr. Gundenberg doesn’t remember any of it.
Jax talks to Tommy about the strange behavior at school. Tommy explains that everyone behaves weirdly around Jax and gives examples: Ronny Steadman’s performance at the game, Jax getting elected to student council without running, Jax’s mysterious victory at a debate with a poor argument, and people at school always coming up to Jax and greeting him and ignoring Tommy. Tommy chalks it up to Jax being lucky.
Chapter 5 Summary
Jax’s class goes on a field trip to see a reenactment of a 20s vaudeville show, complete with singers, dangers, and jugglers. A hypnotist called The Amazing Ramolo comes out to do a demonstration. No one volunteers to do the demonstration so Mrs. Baker, the pre-algebra teacher does it. He hypnotizes her and tells her to dance. Everyone is shocked to see her waltz across the stage. Soon everyone volunteers and Ramolo has them doing various activities onstage. Ramolo tells Tommy to behave like a chicken and warns him that the farmer is coming to chop off his head. Tommy runs around clucking in fear. Everyone laughs and screams until Jax realizes Tommy is genuinely afraid and weeping. Jax tells the hypnotist to stop and asks him to see how he likes being a chicken. Suddenly Ramolo starts clucking like a chicken too. Tommy snaps out of his trance, remembering none of his time as a chicken. After the show, Ramolo awakes from the trance with a bucket of ice water. He rushes to his dressing room and calls someone, claiming he has never felt the power stronger.
Chapter 6 Summary
Jax’s principal receives a letter from Dr. Elias Mako at the Sentia Institute offering Jax a place in their New Horizons program every day after school. The principal sings Mako’s praises to Jax’s parents, and now he’s stuck doing extra school.
Jax finds the Sentia Institute in a brownstone near Park Avenue. It feels like a luxurious house from the 1890s. Jax meets Maureen Samuels, the assistant director. Jax finds her strangely magnetic. A girl Jax’s age, Kira Kendall, takes Jax to the testing room. She is not impressed by him and warns him that Mako is always hoping the newest person with be “the one” who will change the world. She parrots the exact phase the principal said about Mako’s commitment to education. Pictures of Mako cover the walls.
Kira gives Jax a stack of psychological test papers to fill out. He isn’t sure how these questions are supposed to change the world. A tall, swaggering boy named Wilson comes in and knocks Jax’s papers off his desk. Jax faces off with him and feels a new vision coming off, but Kira gets between them. She warns him that everyone at Sentia is competitive.
Chapter 7 Summary
Jax continues plowing through questionnaires for days after school at Sentia. He has yet to meet Dr. Mako. No one will give Jax meaningful information about what they do at Sentia or what his abilities are. He occasionally finds people behaving strangely like they are pretending to be fire or under attack. He thinks he glimpses someone who looks like the Amazing Ramolo.
Jax barges in on Wilson conducting an experiment where a man in a suit runs on a treadmill, seeming like he is afraid for his life. Jax distracts them, causing the man to fall and get hurt. Wilson insists the man was running away from a tiger.
Jax begins to wonder if they are inducing some kind of hallucination in people. He worries he has ended up in a psych ward. Jax talks it through with Tommy who counsels Jax that he isn’t “crazy.”
Back at Sentia, he blows up about Dr. Mako still ignoring him and quits the Institute. At home, his mother gets off the phone with Dr. Mako. He and his family have a meeting with Dr. Mako tomorrow. Jax is too curious to pass it up.
Chapter 8 Summary
Jax and his family go to Sentia. Dr. Mako finishes with his previous meeting, Senator Douglas, the leading Democratic candidate for president, then ushers in the Opus family. Senator Douglas says the same line about Dr. Mako being an inspiration.
Dr. Mako tells Jax that they do hypnotism at Sentia. Dr. Mako believes that Jax has great powers. He knows all about the visions and the strange behaviors that have happened in Jax’s presence. When Jax sees himself from the other person’s perspective, it forges a “mesmeric link” between their minds. Dr. Mako reveals that Ramolo works at Sentia, and he was the one who found Jax.
When Dr. Mako mentions that the ability runs in families, Ashton admits that a whole branch of the Opus family was burned at the stake for being witches. Ashton’s parents were able to hypnotize people, and he never really knew if he liked broccoli or if they just made him think he did.
Dr. Mako promises to help Jax figure out how to use his powers.
Chapters 1-8 Analysis
The opening chapters of The Hypnotists introduce the protagonist and viewpoint character of the novel, Jax Opus. At first, Korman briefly highlights Jax’s normalcy, showing him participating in regular activities like taking the bus with his friends or playing recreational basketball. However, Korman quickly marks Jax as “other” by highlighting his color-changing eyes, foreshadowing Jax’s supernatural power and the transformative nature of discovering these new abilities. By focusing on Jax’s eyes, Korman centers vision and perception, indicating that Jax’s power will impact how he sees the world. Jax’s visions also foreshadow his emotions; they involve him seeing himself through others’ eyes, mirroring the way his self-perception will change based on how others see him.
Within the first chapter, Korman establishes the genre of the novel, subverting expectations and turning an ordinary bus journey into an adventure sequence as the bus driver accidentally follows Jax’s hypnotic suggestion. Korman combines the mysterious supernatural element in the form of Jax’s eyes and vision, with elements like suspense and imminent danger, adhering to genre conventions common in science fiction. Korman also sets up some elements of the coming-of-age genre by centering the story on a 12-year-old protagonist on the cusp of undergoing a major change in his identity. The story largely stays closely tethered to Jax’s point of view, exploring his emotions and reactions to the changes in his life.
These opening chapters also establish the novel’s primary themes. Jax’s early experiences with hypnosis introduce Indirect Versus Direct Control, as Jax directly controls people with his powers while also experiencing the indirect pressures of social influence. Jax dives into the complexity of consent within the world of hypnosis. Though he is often the one imposing his commands on others, his powers appear without his prompting, putting him in unwanted positions where he has accidentally hypnotized someone dangerously. Jax, himself, is not in control of his powers, foreshadowing the way Dr. Mako will eventually use him as a weapon. Jax also experiences the soft power of Dr. Mako, the social influence he wields through his reputation as an elite educator and prominent member of society. Dr. Mako’s reputation provides the kind of indirect control that pushes Jax’s parents to enroll him in Sentia and entrust his education to Dr. Mako, despite not understanding his actual contributions.
Korman also establishes the theme of Morality in the Face of Temptation, as Jax discovers his great power and enters into a community of other powerful people. During Jax’s initial accidental hypnotic experiences, Jax always wishes for something selfish, even though it may cause harm to others. His instinct is to wish for these selfish aims like victory in a basketball game, but he feels uncomfortable with the result once he realizes he exerted an unfair influence. Jax experiences the moral tension that comes with being a hypnotist, a conflict that will play out through him and the hypnotic community throughout the novel. Korman deepens Jax’s character by highlighting Jax’s unease about winning the basketball game using hypnosis, indicating that he has an inner sense of morality that will prevail in the face of temptation.
The turning point in this section occurs when Jax accidentally hypnotizes another hypnotist, the Amazing Ramolo. Korman breaks perspective, cutting away to a phone call Ramolo makes to an off-screen character. This narrative choice builds suspense, setting up the idea that Jax is not only gifted with supernatural abilities but also unusually powerful compared to the other hypnotists. Korman introduces a common theme in middle grade fantasy and science fiction, the idea of the chosen one. However, throughout the novel, he will subvert this trope to explore Heroism Against Destructive Forces.
These opening chapters also see Jax stepping across a threshold and entering a new world, the Sentia Institute. Compared to Jax’s public school, the narrative depicts Sentia as an exclusive, high-society institution for elite students. Little is revealed about its function or purpose, but everyone sings its praises and speaks highly of its founder, Dr. Elias Mako. Korman emphasizes how Mako exists as a prominent member of elite society, associated with politicians and other luminaries. Dr. Mako’s connections give him an air of legitimacy, even as his actual accomplishments and skills remain mysterious. The mystique around Mako foreshadows the sinister nature of his motivations and his eventual role as the primary antagonist in the novel, further cementing the role that Heroism Against Destructive Forces will play throughout the narrative.
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