81 pages • 2 hours read
Tommy GreenwaldA 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.
The pillow from home that Sarah fusses over in the hospital symbolizes both her attempts to manage the guilt she feels and her need to minimize the seriousness of Teddy’s injuries. Teddy is comatose, having lost the ability to understand the quality of pillow he uses. For Sarah, however, the pillow allows for a grasp at normalcy: She is a mother who must ensure her child’s comfortability as they sleep. When Sarah arrives at the hospital, the first thing she says to Teddy centers on the pillow. “I am so mad I forgot your pillow […] I’m going to wash the pillowcase / Get it nice and soft just the way you like it” (9). She resumes her role as mother in an attempt for normalcy. She yearns now to be mother to her son, and as she fluffs his favorite pillow, she gently cradles his head, and she talks to him soothingly as if Teddy were a small child again. Sarah quietly adjusts the pillow and frets over whether she should quickly wash it, foreshadowing the renewal that Teddy’s injury brings to the family.
The pillow also symbolizes the need to preserve hope. Both Jim and Sarah, and Janey for that matter, try to convince themselves that Teddy will wake from his coma soon. “Coma” sounds terrifying and medical, exposing their vulnerabilities and anxieties. If Teddy is in a coma, they are helpless; if Teddy is asleep, they are just waiting for him to awaken. As the pillow from home suggests, he is just sleeping, just like at home, except in a hospital. The doctor and the nurse give similar takes on the brain injury: The nurse tells Teddy each night “Time to dream,” and the doctor advises Teddy to “enjoy a good long sleep” (77). Each night Teddy is in the hospital, before Janey heads home, his little sister wishes Teddy, “Good night.” The pillow thus symbolizes that desperate and necessary strategy for handling the fears over their son and brother’s recovery.
The novel’s epigraph provides the dictionary definition of a game changer: as an “event, idea, or procedure that effects a significant shift in the current manner of doing or thinking about something.” Teddy’s injury functions as the game changer of the novel. Walthorne High School and its champion football team wouldn’t have had to face accountability and provide transparency about its program if Teddy hadn’t been injured. Ethan wouldn’t have made strides in his own maturity if he hadn’t tackled Teddy in response to the bullying he received and hadn’t have had to confront the consequences of his actions. As the details of the Rookie Rampage and the Hit Parade become public knowledge through social media, even the coach, a local sports legend who built a top-ranked program, acknowledges that things cannot be the same.
The novel concludes with a newspaper article, dated the day after Teddy awakens, that closes with only the promise of an investigation. “More on this story as it develops” (286). Although pride in the high school football program runs deep in the small community, the program must undergo an inevitable self-examination to ensure the safety of the kids who participate in the program going forward.
But Teddy’s injury does not only promise to be a game changer for the football program. His brain injury also serves to inspire changes in the Youngblood family unit. Through his parents’ anxieties and admissions while he lays comatose, context is provided as to why the Youngblood family is in disarray. Sarah Youngblood has left the family to search for her own identity, while Jim Youngblood vicariously lives through his son’s accomplishments and fixates on his nostalgic feelings of his own time on the football field instead of prioritizing his family’s well-being. Jim struggles as a single parent, while Teddy and Janey live with their father and visit their mother. The Youngblood parents are constantly in conflict and lash out at one another in their stress over Teddy’s condition.
The Youngblood family is in its own form of comatose existence, and Teddy’s injury exposes these weaknesses, bringing about hope for change. Jim cannot bottle up his anger and pretend everything is okay, while Sarah cannot indefinitely endure her guilt.
Game Changer uses the comatose state to symbolize a temporary break from the normal in which the body undergoes a necessary recovery. For the week that Teddy spends suspended between consciousness and unconsciousness, the town, the team, and his family enter a period of suspended animation.
Everything stops—the town is uncertain whether to support the team that has for so long been their identity. The coach is uneasy over his position and his control over his own program. Students are torn between allegiance to the most powerful clique in school and their own outrage. The team is torn between the underclassmen conflicted by guilt and the seniors who want only to preserve their standing in the town and in the school. Teddy’s family is suspended between the warring factions of divorce.
Teddy’s coma then coincides with each dysfunctional body and gives it the opportunity to stop, assess its condition, and set aside any issues. As Teddy emerges from the coma, they each can feel the hope for recovery. The coma, that suspended period during which healing can begin, is not a terrifying state of unconsciousness, but rather a positive force for directed healing. As Teddy emerges from his trauma, the town, the team, and Teddy’s own family emerge from their symbolic comas and begin the genuine work of healing.
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