Burn

“She called it a prayer stone. It was the size of a radish and taken from their favorite creek and given to him as a reminder to pay attention: Love is attention, she’d said. That is all you know on earth.”

Despite the physical reminder that Jess carries around with him about love, he still struggles to fully connect with and love the people that he’s close to in his life. The narrative connects this behavior with his traumatic relationship with Hannah. However, the idea of “love is attention” becomes ironic when compared to the lack of attention given to Jess by Hannah, causing him immense confusion during his teenage years. The stone also symbolizes permanence and continuity, contrasting with the dissolution of relationships and civil society throughout the novel.

“Everyone had to know in their bones that every life hung by a thread. That the world did. But if we couldn’t pretend to count on a morning of sailing, or fishing, or a visit with someone we loved the next day, we’d go nuts, right? Right. So pretend away.”

The only way that Jess and Storey are able to emotionally survive the experience of war is to play this game of pretend. As they make their way through the woods of Maine, they give themselves various goals—first, to make it back to Storey’s family, and second, to bring Collie back to her parents—which help give them motivation to keep moving forward. The repeated “pretend” emphasizes the fragility of mental resilience during conflict, reinforcing the theme of The Dissolution of Civil Society Under Crisis by showing how even survival requires emotional artifice.