Setting: Santa Ana New-Path residence, McDonalds and Farm Facility in Nappa Valley

Character:

Bob Arctor: Bruce doesn’t know how to function properly anymore, though is still able to have a basic life. He can talk, but usually just repeats what is heard and doesn’t think for himself. At times, a word or sentence would trigger a memory, but even then he wouldn’t know what to make of it. He’s a character who truly has had the worst happen to him. Having to endure his life is worse than the sweet salvation that death could have brought him. Within his broken mind, hope still lays in the form of reactions. His character has completely changed yet maintained to who he once was. While not the sarcastic, humourous that he was once he still provides that humour in new forms.

Donna Hawthorn: Donna shows her true self as a woman who has to do terrible things to help society. She’s fed up with having to be so cold towards people and wants out of it all. She knows that her outward appearance is warm, but inside she feels nothing.

Plot: While in the residence, Bruce is drawn towards the children’s playroom and enjoys being around the kids. He befriends a girl named Thelma who he talks to, but eventually realizes in impaired and wonders what it is like for her. The man that wishes to help him, Mike, actually turns out to be Donna’s partner for the federals and is an inside man. He meets with Donna at a McDonalds to discuss Arctor’s tragic fate and how he is being used to try and see if New-Path is the one distributing Substance D. After their conversation, Mike realizes how Arctor must have felt, trying to get close to a woman who was more like a spirit than anything else.

Arctor eventually meets an old woman named Donna, whose name triggers a memory that he can’t quite understand. It’s this reaction that the feds wish for. Two months later, he gets reassigned to work in the Nappa Valley doing farm work. This happens because Mike talks to the Executive Director of New-Path and says it’d be good for Bruce. Once Bruce is in the Valley, he is shown around the different sites and told what to do. In the corn fields, he sees something and bends down. He finds blue flowers everywhere and swears he saw death growing from the ground. The flowers happen to be the same flowers that Substance D is made from and is what Donna and Mike wanted Arctor to find. The Executive Director states that Bruce shouldn’t worship the flowers because they aren’t his god anymore, though they once were. When no one is around, Bruce takes a flower and states that “it’s a present for my friends.”

Theme: Many themes show themselves during the ending of the book. The most prominent being how lives must be sacrificed for the sake of the greater good. The price that is paid is more than what should be needed, but it something that has to be done.