65 pages • 2 hours read
M. R. CareyThe Girl with All the Gifts
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 36-42Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 36 Summary
The group’s search of the second floor turns up a wealth of canned goods—some edible—and a functioning gas stove. While Gallagher cooks and Justineau sets the table, Caldwell redresses the wounds on her hands. Melanie, still handcuffed and muzzled, sits in the children’s playroom, her ankle chain tethered to a radiator. Justineau brings her food and feeds her through an opening in the muzzle. She then finds clothes about Melanie’s size: colorful jeans, a festive shirt, and sparkly sneakers. Melanie, however, has only worn the simple slip-on uniform of her Hotel Echo days, and she doesn’t know how to dress herself. Justineau agrees to help her in the morning, but Melanie insists both Parks and Gallagher need to be present: “One to untie me, the other to point the gun at me. That’s how many it takes” (204).
Chapter 37 Summary
Melanie and Justineau discuss the day’s events—the attacks and the shootings—and Melanie wants to reassure her teacher that she’s not terribly upset about the hungries being shot. While Justineau vows to protect Melanie from the others, Melanie wonders how anyone can protect her from herself.
Chapter 38 Summary
Gallagher finds an unopened bottle of brandy and the group drinks. By their third round, Gallagher grows uncomfortable, remembering the excessive drinking and violence of his father and brother. He offers to search the area one more time. At the second-floor landing, he gazes down at the hordes of listless hungries congregating below. He returns to the group: Parks and Justineau are still drinking, but Caldwell is asleep. He checks on Melanie and finds her gaze more human than hungry. He offers to read to her, but she says no. As he turns to leave, she asks him to look for Tales the Muses Told, the collection of Greek myths Justineau used to read in class. It’s not there, but he takes another book down and begins to read to her.
Chapter 39 Summary
Still drinking, Justineau and Parks move to the roof for fresh air. They discuss Hotel Echo, and Parks reveals that communications with Beacon stopped five months ago. Justineau assumes the worst: that Beacon has fallen, and that they themselves are the last survivors. Parks disagrees, although he concedes that the situation is dire. Referring to a comment she made the previous day, Parks asks her what she meant by “hard-wired soldier boys” (217). She explains that it means his behavior is so ingrained, he couldn’t change it if he wanted to. Amused by the insult, he puts his arm around her shoulder. She pulls away, shocked, and asks him if he’s ever killed a child.
Chapter 40 Summary
Parks ignores the question and heads for the exit, but Justineau demands an answer. He says no, insulted that she would think him such a monster; Justineau responds with a story of driving home one evening, intoxicated, and hitting a young boy who ran out in her path. Fearing jail and the end of her career, she never reported the accident. Weeks later the pathogen exploded, rendering her guilt moot. Having ended one child’s life, she says, she will not be a part of ending a second one.
Chapter 41 Summary
Caldwell sneaks into the room with the dead hungry and collects tissue samples from the corpse, placing them in small Tupperware containers. She regrets not collecting samples from recently killed specimens earlier. She might have noticed some of the odd behavior—singing, gazing at photographs, pushing a baby carriage—before. With a new sense of purpose and a certainty that she’s getting close to a major breakthrough, Caldwell is even more convinced that Melanie is an important part of her research.
Chapter 42 Summary
The next morning, the group finds the house surrounded by hungries. Between the mob outside and those congregating in the downstairs foyer, they have little hope of escape. Justineau suggests tossing a few grenades from the roof hoping explosions will lure them away, but Parks is out of grenades. They don’t want to risk fire, which might trap them or alert the junkers. Finally, Melanie suggests that she act as a decoy while the others escape. She promises Justineau that she will return, but Parks is skeptical. He questions her about her motives, asking if she’s afraid. She is not, she claims, because hungries don’t attack each other, and she is one of them. The difference is, she doesn’t want to feed on her companions, and she belongs to the group more than she belongs to the other hungries. Parks is satisfied. Before she carries out the plan, however, she wants to wear the new clothes Justineau found for her.
Chapters 36-42 Analysis
Carey reveals Melanie’s humanity in small portions. Early on, she is simply a curious student with a crush on her teacher, but as the group flees the base, she demonstrates a slow-growing, sad self-awareness. She is a monster, she realizes: one of the hungries responsible for the Breakdown and the mass chaos. While she does show flashes of cannibalistic behavior—which Carey uses to ground his audience in the grim reality of his world—exposure to the humans around her rubs off. Indeed, in these chapters, Melanie presents herself as even more human than the other survivors, not infected by fear, selfishness, or ego. She offers to draw the hungries away so the group can escape. She reveals her adolescent side in her desire for new clothes, although her introduction to normal clothes also marks her identification with humans. Most significantly, she articulates a desire to be part of a community. Most hungries “are not with each other” (230), she claims, but Melanie wants to belong—a very human need that differentiates her from the hordes of walking dead that roam the land on autopilot. The fact that she is willing to save the lives of Caldwell and Parks, two humans who have regularly abused her, shows her true character as a sick child who desperately wants to be normal.
A new dynamic also develops between Parks and Justineau, once mortal enemies and now grudging allies. Parks even admits to being sexually attracted to Justineau, a feeling that is not as out of context as it may seem. When facing death, sex—the catalyst of life and the antithesis of death—is a logical response. While Gallagher contemplates suicide and Caldwell focuses on her research, Parks, now free from the responsibility of keeping Hotel Echo secure, realizes that Justineau is an attractive woman, and he begins to harbor fantasies. She does not return his affections, but she admits to respecting his work ethic and his no-nonsense demeanor. It seems unlikely that Parks and Justineau will consummate their tentative camaraderie, but their mutual trust is a mighty leap of faith that seemed impossible earlier.
The progression of the narrative is therefore not just that of a survival tale. Rather, it tracks the characters’ gradual understanding of each other—the realization that those they first thought were monsters have layers of (often flawed) humanity lying underneath. While inside Hotel Echo, Justineau despises Parks for his sadism. She imagines him far more of a monster than Melanie, but their dangerous journey through a hostile landscape shows him to be a duty-bound and relentless protector, yet not so rigid that he can’t compromise when necessary. Parks, while still wary of Melanie, finally begins to trust her, especially after she saves his life. He unshackles her to carry out the escape plan, something unthinkable only a few weeks earlier. Gallagher, terrified of their plight, manages to see Melanie not as the enemy but as a girl—someone with human wants and needs to whom he could read a bedtime story. Carey breaks down his characters’ defenses and assumptions, leaving them with little recourse but to overcome their biases and form a united front. Adversity makes strange bedfellows, the novel suggests.
