105 pages • 3 hours read
Jodi PicoultNineteen Minutes
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2007A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Symbols & Motifs
Alex Cormier’s Judge’s Robes
Alex is a woman who puts her job first, meaning she is a judge before she is a mother. The narrative describes her feeling of authority when wearing her judge’s robes, and the robes themselves indicate the power invested in Alex to judge fairly and impartially. When people see her in her robes, they treat her like royalty. When Alex is most confused and unsure of herself, she isn’t wearing her robes. Alex, as a mother, and without her robes, finds herself questioning her decisions and her relationship with her daughter. When Alex finally recuses herself from the case and takes a leave of absence from work, thus leaving the robes behind, she forces herself to deal with life without the authority she’s built around herself with the robes. Though Alex finds motherhood daunting, she chooses her daughter, Josie, over her work and her robes.
Alex Cormier’s Smoking
As a judge, Alex is known to be calm and collected. Alex, however, also wants people to treat her like a human being. Smoking is a way for Alex to relieve tension. She goes outside at work and smokes, often conversing with the cleaning woman. Peter Ducharme, the police detective, catches Alex smoking and jokes that it is a vice. In this sense, Alex’s smoking is something that reveals her humanity to the reader. She is not above reproach, or above being stressed, and smoking reveals these facets of her complex character.
Josie’s Stolen Pills
The reader finds out that Josie has stolen Ambien pills from her mother. Josie plans on taking the pills to commit suicide if she is no longer welcomed by her popular friends. The passage about the pills, which are taped under Josie’s bed, reveals that Josie is not as happy with being popular as the reader initially thinks. Josie doesn’t know who she is or how she fits in. She goes along with being popular so that she is not at the bottom of the social pole. But Josie wants to tell her friends about her feelings, and to perhaps tell them that she no longer wants to be a part of their world. She knows they will disown her if she does, and the pills are there for Josie to take so that she does not have to deal with a world where she is a social outcast. The pills, however, are flushed down the toilet after the school shooting. When Josie flushes them down the toilet, it signifies that she has grown in her character, and that popularity isn’t everything. It also reveals that death is not as black-and-white or as simple as she originally thought.
Josie’s Miscarriage
When Matt has sex with Josie while drunk, he forces himself upon her and does not use a condom. Josie becomes pregnant, which Matt dismisses. When Josie takes a pregnancy test, however, she confirms what her body has already told her: she’s pregnant. Josie goes online to find natural ways to terminate her pregnancy, and she’s eventually successful. Josie’s miscarriage connects her to her own mother’s initial struggle with whether she should abort Josie. The miscarriage also highlights that Josie has been given a second chance to make things right and have a child when she is ready, and not because her boyfriend forces himself upon her. Though Matt says he will stick with Josie no matter what, the miscarriage is shown in the narrative to be symbolic of both Josie’s and Matt’s inexperience with adulthood, and their inability to be parents, or level-headed teenagers, at the time. Ultimately, it highlights the consequences of rash decisions.
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By Jodi Picoult
