61 pages • 2 hours read
Andrew ClementsThings Not Seen
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2002A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Social Context: Blindness and Invisibility
The main topic of the story is what it’s like to be invisible, both physically and emotionally. Before he becomes invisible, Bobby feels that way at home and school. He resents how his parents make decisions about him without consulting him; at school, he’s ignored by popular students whom he’d like to get to know. His friend Alicia also feels invisible because most of her companions abandoned her after she became blind.
Their sense of being unimportant to others reflects a larger social concern: the feeling of being ignored that many underrepresented groups experience in society at large. Like popular kids in school who pay no attention to those less popular, dominant groups in cities, states, and nations often look down on, disregard, or abuse those deemed less important or less valuable.
Alicia’s feeling of invisibility is not unusual among people with disabilities. She remarks that most of her friends disappeared after she became blind, indicating that it’s hard to be seen and understood when people intentionally look away. In the story, it takes another person with a disability—Bobby, who’s invisible—to fully appreciate her. Through Bobby and Alicia’s eyes, the author describes what it might be like for two reasonably successful and privileged young people to suddenly lose their status and find themselves ignored. The book also explores how sudden disability can sharpen and focus a person’s awareness and enable them to appreciate encounters and sensations that most people take for granted.
(See also the “Further Reading & Resources” section of this guide, which contains a link to the article “Addressing the invisibility of women and girls with disabilities.”)
Literary Context: Invisibility & Speculative Fiction
Things Not Seen centers on a boy who becomes invisible. As such, it’s a work of speculative fiction, or science fiction, that asks the question: What would happen to a person who became invisible? This question has been posed in stories from ancient times to the present, though such an ability has, to date, never come to pass in real life.
An early tale of invisibility is told in The Republic by Plato. Called “The Ring of Gyges,” the story describes a shepherd who discovers a cave filled with jewels, among them a ring that, when he wears it, makes him disappear. He uses this power to kill the king and take over the country. The question Plato poses is whether people would be able to resist the ability to get away with evil deeds. In Things Not Seen, protagonist Bobby wrestles with his own conscience when he discovers he can go anywhere he wants without being observed.
Scientific Context: Invisibility Cloaks
Recent science suggests that it’s not outside of the realm of possibility that people may one day be able to make themselves invisible. Preliminary work has already been performed on specially formed cloaks that redirect light around an object and retransmit it “the way water streams around a boulder” so that it appears as if nothing has blocked the light. This would make the cloaked object effectively invisible. (Service, Robert F, and Adrian Cho. “Strange New Tricks with Light.” Science, Vol 330, #6011, 17 Dec 2010.)
Bobby has no such cloak. Instead, anything he swallows, hides inside his fist, or tucks between his arm and his body disappears. His skin, then, seems to do the invisibility work. The physics of a fully transparent body would be much harder to achieve. Light usually bounces off objects, which makes it possible to see them, but some things—air, water, glass, certain crystals—don’t interact with light particles and instead permit them to pass entirely through. Changing every organ in a body to make them transparent, yet without health problems, would be a stupendous undertaking.
Bobby’s electric blanket has something to do with the cause. Such products push electricity through wires that heat up; this causes an electromagnetic field to form in and around the blanket. The human body also emits a mild electric field, which might interact with the blanket’s field. Research hasn’t yet shown significant health effects from such products, nor from electric hair dryers, overhead power lines, or other devices that induce electromagnetic fields. The exceptions are people with poor circulation, including diabetics, who often can’t tell when such a device becomes too hot. (Frothingham, Scott. “Are Electric Blankets a Safety Concern?” Healthline, 28 Feb 2020.)
Related Titles
By Andrew Clements
.webp&w=640&q=50)
