50 pages • 1 hour read
Suzanne YoungThe Program
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2013A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Struggle Against Oppressive Societal Structures
Content Warning: This section of the guide describes and discusses the source text’s treatment of death by suicide, depression, and psychological abuse and manipulation.
Young explores The Struggle Against Oppressive Societal Structures, which is a theme that often features in dystopian fiction. The use of excessive violence against teenagers with mental illness reveals how an oppressive society will go to any lengths to control its citizens. They are lured in by the promise of safety and happiness offered by the erasure of memories, which is why Sloane’s mother becomes an informant against Sloane. Stigmatizing mental illness causes not only distrust in others but also in oneself, which redirects trust away from the community and toward the government. Rather than follow The Program, Sloane shows resilience by fighting against these oppressive forces in any way she can.
Young employs the dystopian tropes of surveillance, violence, and rebellion to highlight the oppression in their society. Sloane’s flashbacks of the handler taking Lacey away with Tasering, beating, and sedation show the extent of The Program’s violence. The physical aggression of the handlers makes Sloane feel helpless because she does not want to intervene for fear of what might happen to her. This highlights the importance of fear in oppressive systems: The Program knows that no one will interfere with their practices because of the fear of incarceration if they stand up for others. The Program uses isolation and self-preservation to maintain control because teenagers live in fear of being considered “sick.” When Sloane arrives in The Program, she confronts Dr. Francis on the lack of autonomy of his patients. However, Dr. Francis tells Sloane that she cannot have autonomy because of her mental illness, asking her, “How can a proper decision be made when the mind is clouded with disease? It’s an infection […] A behavioral contagion. And we’re the only cure” (128). Dr. Francis’s self-importance reveals that the intention behind The Program is to help people, yet the justification of The Program stems from a belief that other people know what is best for someone’s personal health. The Program thrives because it strips autonomy from its patients and instills fear in anyone who stands in their way by threatening to do the same to them.
At the end of the novel, Sloane learns about the existence of a rebellion against The Program. For the first time, Sloane feels like she is not alone. Apart from James, other people react to Sloane’s criticism of The Program with fear and shock. The knowledge that there are people in the world who want to fight against The Program encourages Sloane and gives her hope. Young’s cliffhanger ending shows that there will always be people willing to sacrifice their safety to push against oppressive systems. This understanding fuels Sloane toward her and James’s decision to join this rebellion.
The Persistence of Emotion and Human Connection
The Program’s correlation between memory and mental illness ignores the strength of emotional connections once formed and the ability of the subconscious to retain feelings. Ultimately, the human mind cannot be fully controlled. The Program believes that it will be able to manipulate its patients by removing memories, yet Sloane still experiences emotions without any basis for them. Even though she does not know why her emotions lead her to make certain decisions, Sloane trusts her intuition. Despite the potentially easier life that her lack of memories offers her—as she’s free from earlier trauma—emotional hardships cannot be escaped. This alludes to the higher point that suffering can only be alleviated through proper treatment and healing rather than forced eradication and repression.
Sloane and James fight against The Program because they cannot imagine living without each other. When James returns from The Program, Sloane knows that he does not recognize her, and this contributes to her depression. Yet even when Sloane is in The Program, she refuses to give up hope that she will remember James after she leaves. This hope proves to be true because Sloane’s physical and emotional connection to James is so strong that she cannot fully forget him. After The Program erases Sloane’s memories, she begins a relationship with Realm. However, when Realm touches her, she cannot get rid of the feeling of being “racked with guilt” without knowing why (227). Sloane feels as if she misses someone with an ache that she describes as a “phantom pain for an appendage that’s no longer there” (223). Young connects the feeling of loss and desire with fate because no matter what The Program tries to do to alter Sloane’s decisions, she finds her way back to her old life. Sloan’s reconnection with Lacey, as well as her intuition about Brady’s death not being an accident, shows that a person’s fate leads them back to their original path.
Sloane’s connection to her emotions opens her up to the possibility of finding James again, even though she must face the hard truth about what happened to Brady. Although Sloane worries that she will never discover why she aches for someone she cannot remember, her heart leads her back to James. Everyone around Sloane, including her parents, Kevin, and Realm, expresses shock over Sloane and James reconnecting, because of the assumption that emotion connects to people’s memories, yet James and Sloane find each other after The Program shows how a person’s psyche contains emotion beyond memory. Despite every effort to keep them apart, Sloane and James reunite because their love for each other transcends their conscious sense of memory.
The Ethics of Involuntary Medical Treatment
Although the memory manipulation described in The Program does not indicate whether it truly helps any teenagers, Young shows how unethical this practice is because of an oppressive society’s ability to coerce people into treatment. As Sloane discovers links to her past after The Program, she struggles with the realization that they stole good memories as well as bad ones—a fact that makes the harmfulness of the treatment clearer. Additionally, while memory manipulation isn’t an actual practice in the real world outside of unsupported processes like hypnosis, there are forms of involuntary and violent treatment that people with mental illnesses endure. Some of these are state-sanctioned, and many require the support of families or guardians, like with Sloane’s mother. The Program, in this case, acts as a metaphor for unethical medical treatment and general emotional manipulation, as well as the stigmatization of mental illness being a tool for societal control.
The ethical issues of memory manipulation are shown in every element of Sloane’s treatment—from their general jurisdiction over everyone’s lives to their creation of her relationship with Realm. Despite Sloane and Realm’s attraction to one another, their relationship is based on a lie. Their power dynamic is imbalanced, though she doesn’t initially know this because he has information about her life that she doesn’t and can drug her when she acts in a way he doesn’t want. Furthermore, even after undergoing treatment and trying to return to her “happier” life, Sloane deeply fears being returned to the Wellness Center. This proves that the positive, unburdened relationships and lifestyle that The Program promises aren’t attainable because a healthy recovery isn’t fully possible under coercion. Even if this process was shown to benefit people, the decision to eliminate—or, as is shown, simply repress—memories instead of coping with them is harmful. Given how The Program ultimately makes the psychological state of the characters worse, it is implied that the government knows this and is encouraging the practice to continue for other reasons—in this case, for control of citizens.
As the first book in the series, The Program does not completely answer the question of if being “happy” in the end justifies involuntary treatment, yet Sloane’s disgust over The Program stripping people of their autonomy indicates that a person should always have a choice over their own body. This is because Sloane connects memory with a person’s identity. Although Sloane does not subscribe to the belief that the returners are completely empty of their past selves, she does not believe in “the thought that ignorance is bliss” (97). Sloane believes that the past, including memories, shapes who a person is. The government is removing individuality from the populace by forcibly treating them in the hopes of reducing dissent and unpredictable behavior. This leads to the perpetuation of depression because, instead of “curing” mental illness, The Program’s removal of memories and identity only furthers isolation, leading people to experience further depression without the comfort of their memories to help them.
