Wool

As the uprising gets underway, characters like Knox and Walker are disturbed by the sense that this has happened before, even as they continue in their course of action. Knox thinks to himself, for instance, that he is like “the bad people he’d learned about in his youth” (308). Though he doubts himself as the leader, he seems helpless to stop the trajectory of the rebellion once it is in motion. Silo 17, the dead and abandoned silo, is an omen of what could happen to Silo 18. As Juliette learns more about what killed off its residents, the people in Silo 18 seem increasingly doomed to follow in their footsteps. The quotes from Romeo and Juliet at the headings of the sections emphasize this sense of humans being condemned to repeat tragic events. Mechanical’s uprising and Bernard’s reaction, despite their respective intentions to improve life in the silo, end up driving them further toward destruction. The ending of the novel, however, is an optimistic statement about the ability of humans to escape the trap of making the same deadly mistakes.

Bernard killed George Wilkins for having the idea of digging laterally to expand the silo, and then of digging it deeper. Such ideas, as he views it, are a “sickness” that needs to be snuffed out before it can infect others. Free thought and the original ideas resulting from it threaten the authoritarian structure of the silo, which relies on unquestioning conformity and obedience. Ideas, like disease, are not only contagious but also potentially fatal in Bernard’s view. Indeed, in support of Bernard’s beliefs, the spread of new ideas about the cleaning does lead to death and destruction, from Allison’s cleaning to Mechanical’s uprising.

Bernard continues the metaphor of ideas as disease when he says, “Ideas are contagious, Lukas. This is basic Order material” (473). Lukas, his protégé, also comes to see this, sympathizing with the concept even as he is led to his execution for his own ideas: “They would say he had broken down and uttered the fateful taboo, but Lukas now knew why people were put out. He was the virus. If he sneezed the wrong words, it would kill everyone he knew” (486). Later he explains to Juliette that he convinced Peter to turn on Bernard in terms of “something[…]about being a bad virus, a catching cold” (501). In this last case, however, the contagious nature of Lukas’s idea leads to the happy end of the novel, saving the lives of many people.