44 pages • 1 hour read
Ottessa MoshfeghMy Year of Rest and Relaxation
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2018A 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 2-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 2 Summary
Though she first obtained her many prescriptions in the winter, it was not until summer that the narrator dove headlong into her project. Now in mid-June and having recently obtained more heavy-duty sedatives, she spends the first week of her hibernation in a blissful haze, not even leaving the apartment for her usual bodega coffee. One day, Reva stops by and expresses concern for the narrator, believing it’s unhealthy to sleep so much. The narrator dismisses her. Reva says the narrator is using sleep to avoid her problems. The narrator says she has no problems.
In the beginning of the project, the narrator has a lot of strange dreams, many of them about her dead parents, to whom she was never close. These disturbing dreams usually involve some painful relational element and old, unwelcome emotions. The narrator’s father is always sick when he appears in a dream—and those dreams are the worst. When such nightmares wake her, she promptly downs whatever pill is available and falls back asleep, unwilling to sit with the acute unease. In her waking hours, she often thinks of her parents’ house in Poughkeepsie, which she has not visited since they died. Despite being advised to sell the house, the narrator has yet to do so, because
[i]t was proof that I had not always been completely alone in this world. But I think I also was holding onto the loss, to the emptiness of the house itself, as though to affirm that it was better to be alone than to be stuck with people who were supposed to love you, yet couldn’t (64).
Apart from a handful of moments in her childhood, the narrator’s parents were never loving or affectionate with her. When she thinks of them, the narrator feels sorry for herself, not because she misses them but “[b]ecause there was nothing they could have given me if they’d lived” (69). Though the narrator keeps a journal of her dreams to share with Dr. Tuttle, she never mentions the ones about her parents. She makes up absurd dreams and lies about her so-called insomnia to procure more pills.
By October, the narrator believes her excessive sleeping is beginning to have an effect, as “I was growing less and less attached to life” (84). Her generalized numbness gives her hope that her hibernation will have the desired effect and that she will emerge from it ready to live her life. Reva’s visits during this time become less frequent, though she also becomes more affectionate, giving the narrator hugs and kisses whenever she leaves; surprisingly, the narrator appreciates the affection.
Chapter 3 Summary
In November, the project’s honeymoon period is over, and the drugs’ more serious side effects kick in: sleepwalking. The narrator begins doing things while she is unconscious, such as rearranging furniture, binging junk food from the local bodega, and making online purchases and beauty appointments. She panics one day after discovering she has sent nude photos to strangers online and locks away her computer and phone to bypass this issue—to no avail. When she sees Dr. Tuttle in December, she avoids mentioning her blackouts and doubles down on her insomnia lie. Dr. Tuttle presents her with a new drug, Infermiterol.
Throughout December, and much to her dismay, the narrator finds herself compulsively thinking of her relationship with Trevor. On Christmas Day, Reva visits the narrator and reports that her mother has died of cancer. Not wanting to feel the lingering effects of Reva’s sadness, the narrator takes one Infermiterol pill and wakes up three days later to Chinese takeout everywhere and a concerned call from Dr. Tuttle. The narrator not only blacked out on the Infermiterol but also engaged in more sleepwalking activity, such as buying seven tubs of ice cream at the bodega and leaving a longwinded message for Dr. Tuttle in which she pondered her own existence. She has no recollection of her sleepwalking activities and only stumbles across the perturbing evidence. Nevertheless, she takes another Infermiterol. Three days later, she wakes up and finds herself on the train to Long Island, wearing a long white fur coat she has never seen before.
Chapters 2-3 Analysis
These chapters explore the first seven months of the narrator’s hibernation project, which, for all its careful calculation, does not progress quite how the narrator hoped. While the first few weeks are relatively peaceful, some of her dreams are strange and disturbing, particularly those pertaining to her parents. Upon waking from these dreams in a panic, the narrator does not reflect on their deeper meanings but instead continues to ignore her emotional issues by taking more pills.
The narrator’s maladaptive self-medication suggests her fear of letting go, since facing her problems head-on would require that she learn to process the painful memories that cause her great suffering even years after the fact. This disposition appears symbolically in her reluctance to sell her parents’ Poughkeepsie estate; she’s attached not to the house but to the emptiness inside, not to her parents but to her parents’ absence. At the same time, she’s attached to the absence because she feels it is “better to be alone than to be stuck with people who were supposed to love you, yet [can’t]” (64). In other words, the loss reminds her she is no longer trapped with a loveless family, so she clings to the loss as though it is as good as love itself. At the beginning of her hibernation project, the narrator is not in the right headspace to process these emotions, so she turns to sleep, believing adequate rest will be her one saving grace.
The novel is charged with an acerbic irony that appears first in the narrator’s general perspective, since so much of what others would consider a blessing (friends’ kindness, for example), she considers a curse. However, the irony appears also in her circumstances. She expects her hibernation to dispel her emotions and to sever her from her past, but the opposite occurs when her buried emotions and memories surface with a vengeance in the form of dreams. This irony conveys partly that an effort to entirely erase one’s past, one’s unconscious, and one’s nature as a relational being is an exercise in futility. But the hibernation project is also based on the narrator’s misunderstanding of redemption: In her heart of hearts, she wants redemption—for herself and her trauma—but her methods of attaining it are confused. Those parts of herself and her life that need redemption, she tries to outright discard. This is a counterfeit redemption. Instead of achieving rebirth, she can therefore only achieve different iterations of a living death.
The idea of a living death also unfolds dramatically in the prescriptions’ untoward side effects. The sleepwalking is indeed its own, separate life—one that plays out while the narrator is, so to speak, dead to the world. Like the nightmares, the sleepwalking signals that the hibernation is not severing the narrator from the world as she’d hoped; instead, it only drives her to engage the world in a new and distinctly unwelcome way. The somnambulant misadventures are an allegory for the famous psychoanalytic maxim: What you resist persists. The idea of living death further ties into hell, and the very name of the narrator’s central prescription alludes to the inferno: Infermiterol. This is a fictional drug of the author’s invention, and its name is pointedly crafted.
The dreams’ irony is twofold. Not only are the dreams’ emotional contents the very thing the narrator sought to escape, but they force her to think back on her relationship with her parents when they were still alive. This rumination is just as upsetting as the dreams. With every chapter, the narrative further shows how familial lovelessness has impacted the narrator, who, even upon reaching adulthood, seems to see love as foreign language.
Still, the narrator seems uninterested in learning that language, since doing so might require engaging the world instead of retreating from it. Even when her prescriptions cause serious side effects, she does not bring this issue to Dr. Tuttle and instead continues to lie about insomnia, which points to her desperation to ignore any and all problems that come her way. That the narrator doubles down on her lie suggests her willingness to go to extreme measures to escape her personal problems. At the same time, she is genuinely hopeful the sleep will bring rebirth.
The only person who treats the narrator with genuine kindness is Reva—whom the narrator finds aggravating, albeit in a complex way. The friction comes partly from the fact that Reva is a foil for the narrator: While the narrator is almost incomprehensibly wealthy, Reva is deeply in debt; while the narrator could not care less about career or self-improvement, Reva strives at these things (however misguidedly). Reva may be unhealthily preoccupied with her social image, but this is because she longs for the very thing the narrator wants to escape: being part of the world and finding belonging in it.
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By Ottessa Moshfegh
