Everyone Is Watching

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Chapter 11

Chapters 12-21

Chapters 22-28

Chapters 29-35

Chapters 36-43

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Themes

The Value of Money

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses sexual assault and abusive relationships.

When the five contestants first arrive at the estate, eager to participate in One Lucky Winner, they all do so for the promised $10 million prize that awaits the winner. For each character, this money means something different. For Camille, it would resolve the financial woes caused by her overspending and tax evasion. Maire is desperate for money to pay for her daughter’s expensive cystic fibrosis treatments. Ned and Crowley seek the funds to further their entertainment and political careers, respectively. Samuel’s motives are less explicit, though he indicates he will give the money to charity. Even at the beginning of the novel, money is thus worth different things to different characters: Winning might save Maire’s daughter’s life, while for Ned it is a way to further his fame and ego.

As the novel progresses, the characters’ motivations to secure the money—and, in turn, their understanding of what is worth risking—shift. The speed and reason behind these changes is one of the novel’s characterization techniques. For example, at first Maire remains in the game because quitting means giving up on saving her daughter’s life. However, when she realizes that she may actually die in the competition, her perspective alters: Her daughters need her more than they need the money she might win. Maire also protects her morals and her image: Her ethics allow for sabotage and injury but prohibit her from causing anyone’s death; she values her daughters’ opinion of her more than the potential cash prize. Maire thus experiences a dawning understanding of what she truly values—and the extent to which that can be bought. Similarly, Camille, whose desire for the money is to solve a money problem, makes this transition even more easily.

The novel criticizes the characters whose desire for the prize money does not change as the tasks grow more dangerous. When Ned fails to leave the competition after almost drowning, his determination is portrayed as a contrast to Maire’s righteous parental love and Camille’s shrewd calculation that quitting will not lead the real game to end. Instead, Ned is framed as being foolishly—and ultimately, fatally—invested in his own ego. The novel’s conclusion presents wealth as a source of moral compromise; when Fern learns that she has inherited $10 million from Cat, she immediately dismisses her ethical issues with the game show and forgives Cat’s years of abuse. Now driven by greed and ambition, Fern plans to film another season of the dangerous game show—continuing the show, the novel implies, will make her even richer and more famous, things that Fern cannot resist.

Desperation Reveals True Character

As One Lucky Winner throws increasingly dangerous challenges at its players, the contestants learn that there is more at stake in the game than the prize money they were promised. This transforms their understanding of their own position; while they arrive believing themselves in competition with one another, they gradually learn that they are actually in competition with the game itself—and, ultimately, with Cat, who is the mastermind behind the challenges. As they move from the promise of reward to the fear of punishment, the contestants grow increasingly paranoid and desperate. How each reacts in the face of that desperation, the novel suggests, indicates their true personality.

After Maire helps rescue Ned from drowning in the lake (something that she made possible, unbeknownst to her fellow competitors and viewers), she claims that anyone would have helped a victim of near drowning—though she also points out that Ned nearly drowned Maire. The novel prompts readers to connect Maire’s confession with her backstory, which involves a death at Tanglefoot Lake, with the implication that college-aged Maire let someone drown. Readers are encouraged to assume that Maire’s guilt over letting someone drown in the past guides her actions in the present.

When subsequent flashbacks reveal that Maire did not allow classmate Damon to drown in Tanglefoot Lake but rescued him, the novel’s portrayal of Maire is altered. She has not fundamentally shifted over time, but has remained ethical. Though she played a reckless prank that led to a driver’s death, she did not intentionally allow anyone to die. Instead, in the past, as in the present, she and Samuel risk harm to prevent a drowning.

Other characters are similarly relatively static—though their thoughts and perspectives change, their core remains stable. Their foundational moral beliefs merely rise to the fore in moments of extreme crisis—suggesting that Maire would always save someone, given the chance, just as Ned would always lash out at others to protect himself, no matter the specifics of the situation.

Exposure as Punishment

Cat’s wants One Lucky Winner to reveal her enemies’ secrets to the world. While Crowley and Ned are already sufficiently well-known that revealing their crimes might have a punitive effect, Cat dislikes that Samuel and Maire’s relative anonymity, as well as Camille’s extremely minor celebrity, means publicizing their misdeeds would be pointless. Cat frames her vindictive exposure as an act of justice—just because the contestants got away in the past doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t face retribution.

The novel does not support Cat’s vigilantism; revealing the dirty secrets of the competitors is not shown to be a particularly beneficial approach to addressing their crimes. The first problem is that Cat’s is less altruistic or justice-minded than motivated by revenge. She despises Samuel not for his role in the driver’s death, but because he kissed Maire while he and Lina were dating. Camille earned Cat’s ire not because of her tax shenanigans, but by doing her job well—telling Cat’s husband that he need not tolerate Cat’s emotional abuse. Only Ned appears to be the correct target for Cat’s vendetta. His sexual assaults have harmed many women, including Fern and Cat; his impunity is presented as partly stemming from his celebrity and resulting power. As a well-known, rich man, the novel argues, Ned has been granted leeway in the public eye, as his sexual violence has gone unreported or dismissed.

Crowley’s narrative most emphatically indicates that publicizing private misdeeds is not a valid or ethically appropriate punishment. Cat resents Crowley for destroying her career as a reporter after she learned about his long-term affair with a sex worker—with whom he has a child. Although Crowley might deserve to be publicly shamed as a former senator who ran on a platform of family values and misappropriated campaign funds, the novel demonstrates that exposure doesn’t only hurt the person who committed a crime. By including one chapter from the perspective of Crowley’s mistress Shana, who is blindsided by the reveal and panics about the effects on her son Caleb, the novel forces readers to consider the wider scope of Cat’s actions. Shana and Caleb are undeserving victims of Cat’s scheme. Moreover, the novel implies that Cat is aware that Caleb and Shana will face public censure even if they are not to blame for Crowley’s infidelity or misuse of campaign funds. Instead, the novel suggests that she cruelly disregards such consequences in her pursuit of revenge—and that this knowledge undermines any claims she can make toward truly pursuing justice.