69 pages • 2 hours read
AviNothing But The Truth
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. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
Truth Versus Perception
Published in 1991, well before the contemporary concepts of “going viral” and “fake news” became important, the novel nevertheless forces the reader to consider the impact that perception can have on what counts as truth. Avi carefully portrays the impact that self-interest and politics have on the characters’ interpretation of the same events.
The conflict between Philip and Ms. Narwin goes viral in part because those involved consciously or unconsciously allow self-interest to shape the stories they tell about the event. Philip’s interest is to be allowed to run track. He initiates the conflict with Ms. Narwin to accomplish the goal of being removed from her class. In recounting what happened in the classroom, he leaves out important details or lies in order to cast himself as a powerless student subjected to abuse and unfairness by a boring teacher with control issues. Dr. Palleni’s interviews with Todd, Cynthia, and Allison all reveal that there is some divergence in the simple facts of what happened on the days when Ms. Narwin forced Philip to leave her classroom. All three students note that they were not paying much attention to what happened, but they rely on their general impressions of Philip and Mrs. Narwin to share their “true” accounts of what did happen.
Reporters, tasked with communicating just the facts, fare little better than the other characters in finding the truth. In her haste to get the story out, the local reporter leaves out key facts, fails to get enough corroborating interviews, and even makes factual errors. These errors are propagated as the story is picked by an Associated-Press-like wire service that serves as a source of news for the national papers. Robert Duval, as a reporter, believes he has the responsibility to get both sides of the story, but this basic principle of journalistic ethics is subsumed by the demand that he focus on the story most people are talking about (a crisis in South America). Ms. Narwin is never able to get her story out as a result.
The administrators in the novel are most concerned with damage control to avoid the defeat of the essential new school budget vote. The memos, statements, and interviews they give are all colored by these worries. The most explicit example of how these interests shape what counts as truth is when Dr. Seymour cherry picks Ms. Narwin’s application for funds to pay for a graduate class to imply that a woman who is seen as one of the best teachers in the school is actually an incompetent teacher. Even when administrators make good faith efforts to be balanced and fair, context ends up shaping what people see as truth. Dr. Doane manages to get money to pay for the graduate class but only at the cost of agreeing to place Ms. Narwin on leave for the rest of the term. Ms. Narwin rightly concludes that these actions look generous on the surface but that the implication is that Ms. Narwin is in the wrong.
The accounts of Ted Griffen and Jake Barlow are both driven by their politics. Ted wants to be on the school board to cut spending and to emphasize traditional values, so it is in his interest to discredit the current board and the school. He places the worst possible interpretation on the conflict between Philip and Ms. Narwin and does so in order to gain power. Jake Barlow, who is interested in capturing the attention of listeners and supporting his political beliefs, ignores or undercuts perspectives in the events that do not support his political aims. The details of what happened in Ms. Narwin’s classroom are seized upon as evidence that conservative values are under assault. The irony is the school suspends Philip because he fails to abide by the rules and respect authority, two values that most traditionalists would encourage schools to support.
For the most part, the characters’ different perspectives on the truth are based in differences of interpretation rather than simple dishonesty. The novel opens with a memo that offers instructions on how the morning announcements are to be conducted. The key word in the memo, the one that causes so much conflict, is “respectful”(1). Is it disrespectful to hum or sing the national anthem when one has been asked to be quiet? Is there something disrespectful about a rule that forces students to remain silent when their national anthem is played? The statements of support from fellow teachers for Ms. Narwin and the rash of memos and letters in support of Philip make it clear that honest people may well disagree on the answers to these philosophical questions.
Avi’s use of the genre of the documentary novel to tell this story underscores how much truth is a matter of perception. The memos, diary entries, letters, telegrams, news stories, speeches, and transcripts of conversations are presented with no effort to offer a clear interpretation of the events or to resolve discrepancies that exist between sources. Instead, it is left up to the reader to draw conclusions about the meaning of events in the novel. In addition, the documents that do offer supposedly “true” accounts of what happened are undercut by knowledge of how these memos, speeches, or news stories have been shaped by the self-interest or biases of the people who produce these documents. The ultimate message seems to be that truth may well be in the eye of the beholder and that understanding of actual events is almost always only partial.
The Meaning of Patriotism
One of the central conflicts in the novel is the struggle over the meaning of patriotism in American culture. For the white, primarily middle-class people of Harrison, New Hampshire, patriotism is associated with upholding traditional, conservative values that hark back to past times. Patriotism in this context is demonstrated through public displays such as singing the national anthem and saluting the flag in spaces such as football games or (to a lesser extent) the public-school classroom. Such public acts of patriotism are seen as obligatory community rites.
Ted Griffen and Jake Barlow show that cynical politicians and media figures can weaponize patriotism for political gain and silence people with whom they do not agree. Both Griffen and Barlow loudly shut down dissenting voices—the “liberal” who calls into Barlow’s show and Ms. Narwin, for example—that deviate from their relatively narrow perspective on the meaning of love of country. In both instances, Griffen and Barlow turn this loud patriotism against people who are perceived as weak.
At root, Griffen and Barlow’s patriotism is one that reflects an us-versus-them mentality that in reality has led to an increasingly partisan American culture in which nuance has been lost. Barlow’s call for his listeners to “[j]ust write her. Postcard. Brick”(116) shows the undercurrent of possible violence when this focus on patriotism is unrestrained by an appreciation for the importance of dissent in American political culture.
Despite the town’s overwhelming support of Philip’s right to sing the national anthem in school, only 22% of the town shows up for the ultimate ritual associated with the American political system—voting. Philip, the mascot for this type of loud patriotism, does not even know the words to the national anthem for which he claimed to be fighting. The low voter turnout and Philip’s ignorance of the words to the anthem both imply that this form of patriotism is at best a hollow display that does nothing to benefit American political and public culture.
The Purpose of Education
One of the key conflicts of the novel is a struggle over the purpose of education in America. The arcs of characters such as Ted Griffen, Ms. Narwin, the school administrators, and Philip demonstrate that ideas about the purpose of education are the subject of debate and that formal education frequently teaches lessons that range far behind the mastery of academic subjects.
Ted Griffen is a local politician who is eager to assume a place on the local school board. He articulates his perspective on the role of education in his campaign speeches. During one speech, Griffen asks his audience, “what is the point of installing computers—which my generation never seemed to need—and at great cost—if our young people are not allowed to practice the elemental values of American patriotism?”(105).Ted’s focus on cost and his later comment that Ms. Narwin’s continued presence in the classroom is related to tenure indicate that Ted’s view of education is one that is more closely associated with the contemporary conservative argument that public education is a drain on tax funds and teachers are ideological foot soldiers who undermine conservative values such as patriotism.
Ted’s perspective on education is mirrored by conservative Jake Barlow, who believes that education should be about “‘the three R’s—reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic—and the three P’s—prayer, patriotism, and parents.’”(110). Education is about learning basic academic subjects but also about encouraging values conservatives approve of, especially ones that favor the status quo and respect for authority.
As an English teacher, Ms. Narwin believes that her main role in the classroom is to teach her students that “literature is important”(5). The simplicity of this message is complicated by questions of pedagogy—how can she reach people like Philip who do not value her knowledge or catch the attention of students who seem to be so concerned with questions of fairness, while maintaining discipline in the classroom, dealing with bureaucracy and paperwork, interacting with parents, and dealing with sometimes outsized expectations about the ability of school to mitigate challenges that exist outside the classroom. Ms. Narwin’s peers, including Coach Jamison and Mr. Lunser, all confront these challenges to some degree.
The administrators—Drs. Seymour, Doane, and Palleni—are also educators, but their perspective on education has little to do with academics. Dr. Seymour prioritizes the school budget over protecting Ms. Narwin. Dr. Doane is caught between supporting the teachers she sees every day and placating the more political demands of Dr. Seymour. She sees no problem with paying for training to make the marching band sound good at football games instead of a class that will improve Ms. Narwin’s teaching. Dr. Palleni, tasked with handling much of the discipline in the school, focuses on education as a practice in following institutional rules and embracing values that support rule-following. He tells the Malloys that at school, “‘everybody has to work together. Cooperation. If a student creates a disturbance in a classroom, that’s breaking a rule. An important rule. Students cannot break—cannot make a disturbance in a classroom’”(69).
The adults in the novel have a wide variety of perspectives on the purpose of education, but students also have their own ideas about what they should be getting out of school. Philip’s primary concern in and out of school is running and whether he will be allowed to join the track team. His diary entries, his TV viewing, and the conflict with Ms. Narwin all revolve around his desire to participate in school sports. Philip views his classroom time through the lens of a race: “You have to have a strategy—know when to take it easy, know when to turn on the juice. Get teachers to think you’re in control. Have to know when to kick. Like—put in one of their ideas”(7-8). Philip is mostly concerned with doing the minimum amount of work required to be allowed to run, and all the buzzwords associated with contemporary education—using critical thinking skills, processing information, making meaning out of texts—mean little to him.
Philip learns most of his lessons about appreciating literature, facing the consequences of breaking rules, and cooperating with others outside the classroom or in spite of the efforts of adults. Philip enjoys reading The Outsiders, despite it not having been assigned, because it is relevant to his experience as a teenager, because it represents teenagers who are relatively free of the demands of parents and other people with authority, and because a friend loans it to him. His awful realization that breaking rules and undermining Ms. Narwin mean that he will not be able to run happens in informal conversations with the track coach, reflections in his diary, and social interactions with friends and fellow students. Avi’s choice to have these be the moments of epiphany implies that sometimes the most important lessons are ones that extend well beyond what schools explicitly attempt to teach students.
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