59 pages • 1 hour read
Lev GrossmanThe Magicians
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2009A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaBook 1, Chapters 13-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Book 1
Book 1, Chapter 13 Summary: “Fifth Year”
Eliot, Janet, and Josh leave Brakebills while Quentin and Alice remain there. Four Third Years are assigned to the Physical Kids, but Quentin and Alice feel little connection to them. The departure of the others causes Quentin to feel sad. Though friendships had frayed a little at the end, for Quentin and Alice, it feels like the “end of an era” (199).
They decide they need to socialize more with other Fifth-Year students, and use Alice’s position as a “Prefect” (197) to reconnect with Gretchen, who is also a Prefect. At Brakebills, “Prefectships were given to the four students in the Fourth and Fifth Years with the highest GPA […] Their actual responsibilities were petty things like regulating access to the phone,” and they have “access to the Prefects’ Common Room” (197). Penny is also a Prefect, but because his Discipline is “arcane and outlandish” (198), he studies independently with Professor Van der Weghe. When he’s not attending classes, which is often, Penny keeps mostly to himself.
Quentin also tells Dean Fogg about Julia and about how her life has been ruined because of Fogg’s failed memory wipe. Quentin hopes Fogg will do whatever is necessary to help Julia, but leaves his office uncertain of whether Fogg can or will.
When Christmas arrives, Quentin chooses not to go home, and instead joins Alice for Christmas with her parents. Unlike Quentin’s parents, Alice’s parents are also magicians, so there’s no need for deception. Alice’s father “does architectural magic” (201), and her mother has been doing research on “fairy music” (204). Alice’s parents are rarely seen together, because “they hated each other […] over the course of two weeks Quentin glimpsed Alice’s mother exactly once” (204). In Alice’s eyes, her parents are typical of most magicians: they graduate and don’t know what to do with themselves. It’s all meaningless, Alice’s mother tells Quentin, “there’s nothing out there” (206). She wants Quentin to promise that he and Alice will never be like them, “just doing pointless things all day and hating each other and waiting to die” (206).
Book 1, Chapter 14 Summary: “Graduation”
Graduation is upon Quentin and Alice. The two weeks spent with Alice at her parents have brought Quentin and Alice closer together. They both wonder about how Eliot, Janet, and Josh are doing. Quentin has heard that they are “all living together in an apartment in downtown Manhattan” (207). Other than brief and somewhat cryptic postcards from Janet telling them about how great New York is, and that Eliot is drinking a lot, they’ve had no other contact.
During Quentin and Alice’s last semester, Professor Fogg decides to enter Brakebills into an international Welters competition. It’s the first time Quentin has “traveled to overseas magic schools” (208). Brakebills loses all their matches and bows out of the tournament. The end of the tournament also marks the beginning of the end for Quentin and Alice at Brakebills: “The most insignificant things Quentin did felt momentous, brimming over with anticipatory nostalgia” (209). At other moments, however, nostalgia gives way to a desire “to get out” (209).
The prospect of life after graduation becomes more and more daunting for Quentin. While Alice is interested in pursuing “a post-graduate program in Glasgow” (210), Quentin wants something else, something different; he’s just not sure what. In Quentin’s mind, he’s “still waiting for some grand adventure to come and find him” (211).
Alice and Quentin complete their theses with little enthusiasm. Alice attempts “to isolate an individual photon and freeze it in place” (211), with uncertain results, while Quentin decides to fly to the moon and back. Quentin “sheepishly” (212) returns two days earlier than planned, having failed to get anywhere near the moon, and drowns his sorrows in alcohol.
It’s now two weeks before graduation. Quentin and Alice, along with 17 other Fifth-Year students attend the graduation ceremony. After the usual toasts and singing, Professor Fogg takes all of the students down to the basement, through a manhole cover, and “into a circular chamber large enough for all nineteen of them to stand upright in a circle” (215). The chamber is beyond Brakebills’ protection spells.
Fogg begins by telling them of the challenges they will all face, and about what he thinks makes all of them magicians. It is not because they are smart, or “brave and good” (217), but because somewhere inside of them, they are “unhappy,” adding that “a magician’s strong because he feels pain” (217), and because a magician understands that they can make a difference in this world. He then tells the students that a pentagram containing a demon will be tattooed on their backs. When released, the demon will protect them.
The next day the cohort officially graduates. Quentin is numb, and can see that Alice looks no better. Quentin knows he should be happy, thinking, “I got my heart’s desire […] and there my troubles began” (220). However, before he can give much thought to his concerns, Josh, Janet, and Eliot show up, with Josh telling Quentin and Alice “we’re going to take you away from all this” (221).
Book 1, Chapters 13-14 Analysis
Anxiety and nostalgia are central to these chapters. Eliot, Janet, and Josh have all left, and Quentin and Alice are the last two members of their quintet at Brakebills. Though new members have joined the Physical Kids, Quentin and Alice feel they have little in common with the younger members. The departure of their friends has created a sense of sadness in both Quentin and Alice, causing them to become more isolated. For so long, Quentin has dreamed of this perfect reality, and for a while he achieved it at Brakebills. But now that world is gone, and the uncertainty of the future has left him longing for the past. This becomes much more pronounced once Quentin enters Fifth Year.
Quentin has always had difficulty dealing with reality, but with the moving on of the three older Physical Kids, and his visit to Alice’s parents, he begins to get a glimpse of the uncertainty and potential meaningless that await him. Eliot’s heavy drinking, as described by Janet, and the behavior of Alice’s parents are symbols for a future that Quentin wants no part of. The foreboding sense that his dream is likely to crash and burn begins to haunt Quentin by the time he nears graduation, symbolized by Quentin’s failed attempt to fly to the moon. Quentin becomes increasingly anxious and more and more preoccupied with nostalgia. Alice feels it too, though not quite as intensely as Quentin does. By the end of Fifth Year, both Quentin and Alice have lost interest in their studies, and Quentin has become more wary of life after graduation.
