47 pages • 1 hour read
Monica HughesInvitation To The Game
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1991A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 5-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “The Archbishop or the Grasshopper?”
Returning from The Game, the group finds a former classmate, Rich, waiting outside their apartment. Rich, who was working as a psychiatrist-in-training under his father’s supervision, is now unemployed after a robot replaced his job. The Government tells him to report to the address where Lisse and her friends live.
The group tells Rich about The Game. They recall how the Manager said there was supposed to be a person with medical training in their group, guessing that the Manager meant Rich. Rich hypothesizes that The Game is some sort of virtual reality. Scylla asserts that a sticky green substance she finds in her hair is proof The Game is real, but Rich points out the substance is probably “electrolytic jelly” which is used “to make a good contact between diagnostic electrodes and human skin” (92). This seems to confirm Rich’s theory. Lisse refuses to believe Rich because she views The Game as the only meaningful part of their lives, asking, “If it isn’t real, what have we got?” (93).
The others try to convince Rich to join their exercise routine in preparation for The Game, but he rebuffs them and sulks. They receive another invitation to The Game, and, this time, Rich is invited. They also receive an invitation for Benta, Lisse’s best friend from school, who is working on her family farm.
The group goes to scavenge a mattress for Rich. When they return, a helicopter lands near their building. Lisse is afraid they will be arrested, but the helicopter is there to drop off Benta. Benta brings a basket of fresh food from her farm. She explains that she lost her job after the Government mechanized her farm, and she was ordered to report their address. On the way, criminals tried to attack her. The Thought Police arrested them and took Benta to the group’s apartment.
Using the food Benta brought, the teens make a feast. They speculate that The Government brought Benta to them because they mentioned her agricultural knowledge in The Game. The idea that her life has been overturned for a game upsets Benta, who misses her family.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Autumn and Winter 2154. The Milk of Paradise”
The group plays The Game again, this time with Rich and Benta also joining them. Lisse tries to resist falling asleep in the hypnotic chair by telling herself The Game is not real, but she fails to stop herself from being in The Game. When she wakes, they are in the “misty lands” (105), a wooded area, which they had been seeking the last time they played.
Lisse tries to convince Benta, and herself, that The Game is real. She eats a nut from the ground, which tastes so good that it reminds her of the phrase, “milk of Paradise” (106) from the poem “Kubla Khan” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Rich still thinks The Game is a simulation. The teens fall asleep in a meadow and wake up back on the same reclining chairs in the real world.
On their next trip to The Game, they try to make fire, but they don’t succeed because their kindling is damp. They continue visiting The Game, exploring more areas. The Game feels like their only purpose in life. Autumn and winter pass. During a visit to The Game in the spring, The Game changes. Lisse notices that instead of instantly falling asleep and waking in The Game, she instead dreams a dream she later can’t remember. When she wakes, she senses something is amiss.
Chapters 5-6 Analysis
Chapters 5 and 6 explore the question of whether The Game is reality or a simulation and whether it matters in the dystopian world of the novel. While Rich asserts that The Game must not be real because The Game Manager is using technology to hypnotize the teens, Lisse and Paul both object to Rich’s accusation that they are wasting time on a simulation. Lisse admits that the Game gives the teens’ lives meaning, so she chooses to believe it is real because the alternative would imply that their lives have no purpose. Paul takes this debate a step farther by using a metaphor to compare The Game and reality to a saying about the archbishop and the grasshopper: “‘The archbishop is asleep and dreaming of a grasshopper that is sitting on his chest,’ he said. ‘Or is he? Perhaps it is the grasshopper who dreams of sitting on the chest of a sleeping archbishop?’” (93).
Paul’s parable suggests that what is real depends on one’s perspective. In other words, people create their own meaning in the world. This idea aligns with the philosophy of existentialism, which asserts that humans must create their own meaning in life. Since Lisse and the other teens choose to believe The Game matters, it does.
The philosophical implications of the teens’ debate, however, ultimately proves to be irrelevant since the teens later find out The Game is real. The virtual reality they experience is not physically real, but it is a genuine preparation for living on a new planet. Therefore, The Game’s trajectory of transforming from simulation to reality mirrors the teens’ own psychological transformation. When they first start, they view The Game as a game, but as their commitment to it grows more serious, and they draw more meaning from it, it becomes real to them.
Lisse’s allusion to the poem “Kubla Khan” when she eats a nut in The Game also aligns with the theme of uncertainty over what is real. Lisse recalls the lines, “Beware, beware […] for he on honeydew has fed and drunk on the Milk of Paradise” (106). The poem refers to a drug user who is dreaming of a magical land. The “Milk of Paradise” is a euphemism for opium. In the context of this novel, the lines suggest that The Game could be an escapist fantasy that is not actually real, as Lisse fears. On the other hand, the word paradise, which Lisse uses to refer to the taste of the nut, has a religious connotation of heaven. It suggests that the world of The Game is a heavenly place, a promised land of abundance. Lisse’s allusion addresses the teens’ main questions about The Game: What is its purpose, and is it benign or nefarious?
Another theme these chapters explore is The Government’s moral ambiguity. The Government has near total control over its populace: For example, it responds to the teens’ offhand comments about their employed friends by laying off both Rich and Benta from their jobs so they can put their skills to use in The Game. The Government’s vast reach is clear, but it is unclear whether The Government is good or evil. It seems to fit many stereotypes of an evil dystopian government: It uses repressive tactics against any who rebels against it, it doesn’t allow people to make their own choices about what to do with their lives, and it surveils people and uses fear to keep them in check. While the teens do critique The Government, they seem to accept that it governs the way it does for a reason. Thus, it is not viewed as the enemy, just as a faceless power that rules their lives.
The novel depicts the psychological effects of living under an authoritarian government. When a helicopter drops off Benta, Lisse fears the thought police are coming for her: “My skin prickled and I wondered why I felt guilty? Surely we’d done nothing wrong? […] I had that rat-in-a-maze feeling again” (98). The motif of feeling like a rat-in-a-maze, which recurs throughout the book, evokes the sensation of always being watched and controlled. The Government’s surveillance makes Lisse feel helpless because she senses that her own life is not in her control. This contrasts greatly from the feeling of purpose the teens gain from participating in The Game. Ironically, both the thought police and The Game stem from the same source—The Government that is manipulating the teens both in the city and in The Game. The rats-in-a-maze metaphor also refers to experiments wherein a scientist determines a rat’s intellect by its ability to navigate a maze; this reflects the objective of The Game, which is to determine whether Lisse and her friends are capable of colonizing an uninhabited planet.
