The Compound

Eli believes that it is his fault that Eddy died, after being left behind during the trip to the Compound. Eli describes himself as “getting good at cold and detached. Too good” (67). During his life in the Compound, he goes to great lengths to avoid emotional bonding with his family, and particularly with the Supplements. All positive emotions or sensations eventually remind him of his role in Eddy’s absence.

More than once, Eli describes himself as being unworthy of love and physical touch. When he tells his mother about the night he lured Eddy away with the kitten, she tells him, “You’ve always been worthy” and that “Children make mistakes” (177). This is a hard lesson for Eli to take, given that life in the Compound cannot afford mistakes: the food sources are drying up, Rex is poisoned (seemingly accidentally), and the family is on the road to cannibalism or collapse. Of course, the food supply is Eli’s responsibility, which adds to his feelings of guilt that his failure may be the cause of resorting to cannibalism.

Eli’s shame manifests in his inability to handle touch, which makes it easier for him to avoid bonding. When the novel begins, Eli has not let anyone touch him in six years. In the first scene when he plays basketball with Terese, he avoids her hands when she gives him the ball. He thinks: “No one ever touched me. I didn’t allow them to. I didn’t touch them either. Not since the night we arrived here” (24). He feels as if he is a destructive force that might destroy everything he touches.

Eli’s resistance to touch is puzzling until the reader learns how much Eli enjoys touch, and how much guilt he feels over Eddy’s death. After he wakes up and finds the Supplement touching him, he “couldn’t erase how fresh and soft those little hands had been on my face. I refused to let myself dwell on how that exquisite that warm, innocent touch had felt. A touch like that was meant for someone good. For someone who deserved it” (110). Eli can’t be touched or come emotionally close to his family because he feels responsible if they perish, whether by accident or by becoming a food source for the family. This is a common emotional response to isolation, so much so that the last line of Catcher in the Rye is Holden Caulfield telling his readers, “Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.” The danger of connection to others is that there is always a possibility of losing that connection.

Rex seems to have created this alternate, nuclear world in order to force those connections between his family members. He tells Eli that he did it because he wanted to spend time with Eli, which the reader can assume would only make Eli feel even more guilty. Late in the book, Rex tells his children, “What would be left once you had seen everything? Done everything? I didn’t want you to feel like I did, like the world has a limit on new experiences” (168). There is a void that Rex seeks to fill, and the Compound is his misguided, sinister attempt to give his children something that he never had.