52 pages • 1 hour read
Ally CondieThe Unwedding
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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The Trauma of Survivor’s Guilt
Condie positions the grief and trauma that her protagonist, Ellery, carries after surviving a fatal accident alongside her students and her best friend Abby as an emotional undercurrent, running under and informing the primary action of the novel. Throughout The Unwedding, Ellery offers a powerful example of living with traumatic grief and survivor’s guilt. Throughout the narrative, Condie represents grief as a constant, and obtrusive pain for survivors of traumatic events—a force that impacts Ellery physically: she is “electric with grief” (9), “mired in grief” (16), and “frozen in grief” (288). As a result of this trauma, “nothing [feels] right, ever” in Ellery’s body (19). She imagines herself as “a brain thinking about things it shouldn’t and nerve endings reaching out in every direction” (30). These passages demonstrate the physical nature of grief, which can be literally painful for survivors like Ellery. She describes the fatal accident as something “that was so dark it followed [her] everywhere” (45). Even two years after the accident, Ellery is surprised at “how pain could compound on pain, how you could hurt, and hurt, and hurt […] how much you could feel, over and over again” (45). These passages emphasize Ellery’s grief as a constant presence in her life, compounding with time, rather than decreasing—an obtrusive force “always waiting for any sign of weakness” (37). Even on good days, when Ellery is “pushing through, functioning at least somewhat normally from the outside,” she can “feel [grief] coming for her” (136). Condie asserts that Ellery’s grief intrudes on her life in ways that are often unexpected—physical, constant, and obtrusive pain.
In addition to embodying a moving depiction of grief, the character of Ellery also offers a poignant example of survivor’s guilt, a specific kind of post-traumatic stress in which individuals feel guilt after surviving an incident in which others were killed or harmed. Two years after the accident, Ellery still worries that she could have done more to save the students involved in the crash, especially Annabel, a student who died in her arms. For Ellery, the experience of finding Ben’s corpse evokes memories of “other injuries, other faces, the screaming of students” (85), and, specifically, Annabel’s death. Ellery’s repeated hallucinations of Annabel’s death suggest that she maintains not only grief but also survivor’s guilt as a result of her traumatic accident.
Class Tensions in Luxury Tourism
In The Unwedding, Condie represents luxury tourism as reliant on a strict division in social class in which the workforce remains in service to guests 24 hours a day. Condie distinguishes Ellery from the rest of the guests at The Resort at Broken Point by positioning her as an outsider among her wealthier counterparts. Her frequent concerns about spending beyond her means and respectful treatment of the employees also set her apart as the plot progresses. At the beginning of the novel, Condie initially presents the employees of The Resort at Broken Point as an attractive but anonymous group, such as the “doe-eyed young woman” (10) who greets Ellery at check-in and “a waiter in a cuffed white shirt” who “pull[s] out Ellery’s chair” at the restaurant (11). These descriptions suggest that, through Ellery’s eyes, the employees match the luxury and beauty of The Resort while remaining unobtrusive, thus ensuring a peaceful and luxurious experience for guests. Even after getting to know employees Canyon and Brook, Ellery wonders if “people who [work] at Broken Point [have] to have special nature-y names, like River or Poppy or Sage” (39), emphasizing the idea that the employees present a performative and constructed image to the guests that obscures their true selves, adding to the suspense of the mystery narrative.
However, as the chaos of the storm and multiple murders consumes The Resort, the “carefully overlaid luxury-resort-employee façade” begins to fall and the boundaries of wealth and class between the guests and the employees begin to dissolve (165). As the storm escalates, the staff eliminates many of the guests’ luxury amenities, such as the restaurant and daily housekeeping. The workers explicitly tie these cutbacks to safety measures, “putting some of the responsibility for what [is] happening back on everyone else” (146). However, even as the symbols of luxury fall away, the invisible tension that divides staff from guests remains intact. Ellery recognizes that “there must be other situations unfolding and problems to be solved of which the guests [aren’t] even aware,” further emphasizing the divide between the two groups. Many of the guests continue to take the workers for granted even in the height of the crisis. In Chapter 30, Ben’s groomsmen ask the workers to organize a memorial service for Ben and Matt in the middle of their rescue operations. Canyon is tasked with “babysitting” the memorial because he is “physically strong enough to overpower any of the groomsmen if they [get] drunk” (164). The contrast between the physical threat of the groomsmen and the use of the word “babysitting” suggests that Canyon and the other workers see the guests as immature, entitled, and, in emergency situations, a real threat to the safety of the group. The novel suggests that the class divisions on which luxury tourism relies can strain dangerously under pressure.
The Importance of Maintaining Friendships
As the title of the novel suggests, troubled romantic relationships remain at the heart of The Unwedding. However, the novel’s resolution emphasizes the value of close personal friendships that provide support and stability even when romance ends. Ellery’s friendship with Abby, a fellow teacher and survivor of the fatal bus accident, offers a powerful example of the transformative power of friendship in Ellery’s life. Ellery describes Abby as “feisty and smart and gorgeous and funny and loyal” and notes that Abby “made her laugh harder than anyone else” (16). After the fatal bus accident, Ellery and Abby “had been each other’s lifeline,” offering support when others in their life struggled to understand their grief (16). The novel indicates that Ellery and Abby bond over the fact that they had been together “when the worst thing had happened” (17). In addition to surviving the accident, Abby’s experience with a painful divorce allows her to empathize deeply with Ellery. The fact that Abby “[is] now happily remarried and had made it through, as she said, to the next part of her life” gives Ellery hope for her own next chapter (17). Ellery’s friendship with Abby enables her to survive two devastating losses, suggesting that strong friendships are essential to adult life.
Condie explicitly contrasts Ellery and Abby’s friendship with Ellery’s failed marriage to Luke. When the resort goes into lockdown and guests are required to provide emergency contacts, “Ellery [writes] down Abby’s name and number instead of Luke’s” (80), suggesting that she trusts her friendship more than her 20-year marriage. Ellery believes that, because of their divorce, Luke “certainly [won’t] care” if her life is in danger but is equally confident that “Abby [will] care” (80). In the novel’s final pages, Ellery again contrasts Luke and Abby, concluding that “No matter what some people chose to do with the love you gave them, there would be others who would take it in the purest sense” (320). The novel’s conclusion—in which Abby, and not Luke, arrives to take Ellery home—reinforces the value of the love between friends.
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