38 pages • 1 hour read
John GuareSix Degrees of Separation
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1990A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Sections 5-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Section 5 Summary
When Geoffrey leaves, Kitty and Larkin, “another couple in their forties” (54) whose son attends Harvard with the Kittredge children, come on stage and Ouisa and Flan “take off their robes and are dressed for day” (54). Ouisa says, “Do we have a story to tell you!”; Kitty counters by saying, “Do we have a story to tell you!” (54).
Kitty gets to “go first” (54) because their story took place on Friday night rather than the previous evening. She reveals that she and Larkin “are going to be in the movie of Cats” (55). Ouisa and Flan quickly realize that the others had an almost identical experience except that they woke up to “somebody screaming Burglar! Burglar!” and found Paul “chasing this naked blonde thief down the corridor” and believe that “[t]he kid saved our lives” (55).
As the two couples exchange details about the night before and try to get hold of Sidney Poitier, who they believe is staying at a hotel Paul had mentioned, “an elaborate arrangement of flowers” (58) arrives. The card reads, “To thank you for a wonderful time. Paul Poitier” (58). To everyone’s confusion, the bouquet also contains “a pot of jam” (58).
The couples decide to call the police and “a detective appears” (58) on stage. The four people then give a series of short, often unnecessary details, about Paul’s visit to their houses, ending with the fact that he “didn’t steal anything” (59). Ouisa acknowledges that “this does not seem major now” (60) and the detective tells them to “[c]ome up with charges. Then I’ll do something” (60).
The detective leaves and is replaced by Woody and Tess, as well as Kitty and Larkin’s son, Ben. They “enter, groaning” (60), plainly embarrassed by their parents. Ouisa explains that Paul “has this wild quality—yet a real elegance and a real concern and a real consideration” (60). Tess counters that Ouisa “should have divorced all your children and let this dreamboat stay” (61).
The adults try to track down Sidney Poitier without success. Kitty mentions that she has “a friend who does theatrical law. I bet he—” but Larkin cuts her off, demanding, “What friend?” (61). Kitty quickly dismisses this, saying “Oh, it’s nobody” (61) and they bicker briefly and end up talking over each other, with Larkin repeating “I don’t want to know. I don’t want to know, and Kitty repeating “Nobody. Nobody. Nobody” (62).
Flan asks Tess to tell her little sister that Paul “and the, uh, hustler, used her bed” (62) but Tess refuses “to get involved in any conspiracy” (62). Flan insists that “It’s not a conspiracy. It’s a family,” and the two “growl at each other” (62) as the stage goes dark.
The lights come up on Ouisa, who lies down on a sofa. Paul “appears wearing the pink shirt” (62) and talks at length about the imagination. He declares that “our imagination teaches us our limits and then how to grow beyond those limits” (62) and states that it exists “to show you the exit from the maze of your nightmare, to transform your nightmares into dreams that become your bedrock” (63). He concludes that “The imagination is not our escape. On the contrary, the imagination is the place we are all trying to get to” (63).
Part way through his speech, Paul “takes out a switchblade and opens it” and at the end he “lifts his shirt and stabs himself” (63). Ouisa “sits up and screams” and Paul vanishes. The phone rings and the detective tells Ouisa that he “got a call that might interest [her]” (63).
Section 6 Summary
Dr. Fine, “a very earnest professional man in his 50s” (63), appears on stage and recreates the incident to which the detective is referring, while the other adults watch. Paul came to Dr. Fine’s office with “a knife wound, a few bruises” (63) and claimed to be a friend of his son.
Dr. Fine say he is a fan of Poitier because he “really forged ahead and made new paths for blacks just by the strength of his own talent” (64), something Dr. Fine admires in part because of his Jewish heritage. He considers helping Paul to be part of “paying off debts” (64) to Poitier for his inspiration. He gives Paul the keys to his house.
Dr. Fine calls his son Doug and tells him what he has done, stating that “you accuse me of having no interest in your life, not doing for friends, being a rotten father. Well, you should be very happy” (64-65). However, Doug says he has “never heard of [Paul]” and calls Dr. Fine “a real cretin” (65) for giving his keys to “a complete stranger who happens to mention my name” (65). He adds that he is “so embarrassed to know you” and that his mother “told me you beat her!” before repeating, “You’re an idiot! You’re an idiot!” (65).
When Dr. Fine tries to get the police to arrest Paul, Paul points out that he was given the keys and the detective can do nothing, leading Dr. Fine to shout out that “This fucking black kid crack addict came into my office lying—” (66).
Ouisa gets a copy of Poitier’s autobiography and learns that he has daughters but no sons. Only then do they accept that Paul is not Poitier’s son. They discuss the fact that “all we have in common is our children went to boarding school together” (69) and the children all “enter, groaning” (70).
Flan asks them, “Who in your high school, part of your gang, has become homosexual or is deep into drugs” (70) but Tess points out that “That’s like, about fifteen people” (70). Ben calls their attitudes “so limited” and Tess says “That’s why I’m going to Afghanistan. To climb mountains” (71). Flan says that they “have not invested all this money in [their kids so they can] scale the face of K-2”; Tess asks if she is simply “an investment” (71).
The adults continue to ask their children to track down someone from their class who might be connected with Paul; their children dismiss the exercise as “so humiliating” and “so pathetic” (73). Tess adds that it is “so racist” and Ouisa insists that “This is not racist!” (73). Later, they compare the situation to “the KGB” (74), “the entire McCarthy period” (74), and “Social Darwinism pushed beyond all limits” (75). However, once their parents leave, the children all quickly agree that the person they are after is Trent Conway.
Sections 5-6 Analysis
After talking to Kitty and Larkin, Ouisa and Flan realize that they are not the only ones conned by Paul. Together, they try to track down Poitier, still naively believing that the actor is really Paul’s father. Despite eventually calling the police, they appear reluctant, on some levels, to truly dismiss the version of Paul that he presented to them.
Ouisa, in particular, remains extremely taken with the young man and is keen to defend him, ensuring that she tells the detective that he “didn’t steal anything” (59) and explaining to her children that Paul has “this wild quality—yet a real elegance and a real concern and a real consideration” (60), much to their annoyance.
The arrival of the children brings up another important theme: family. Part of the reason Ouisa is so keen to accept Paul is that he represents a more appealing version of her children. As she was previously surprised by his cooking skills, “amazed” (39) when he washes up, and deeply impressed with his thesis, she sees in Paul a potential son figure who offers more than her own children, who seem largely to be embarrassed, sarcastic, and prickly.
None of the families are especially happy. It is heavily implied that Kitty is having an affair with her friend in “theatrical law” and there is repeated conflict between the parents and their children. This is particularly true of Dr. Fine’s relationship with Doug, who readily dismisses him as “a real cretin” and “an idiot” (65) but applies to all them, as the parents generally seem disinterested in the children and the children seem mortified by their parents’ “pathetic” (73) behavior. Indeed, Flan and Tess seem to disagree about whether their connection is “a conspiracy” or “a family” (62).
Like Holden Caulfield, the stereotypically angry teenagers are particularly annoyed with their parents’ “phoniness,” especially their latent racism (something which emerges once again when Dr. Fine goes from praising Poitier for blazing “new paths for blacks just by the strength of his own talent” (64) to dismissing Paul as a “fucking black kid crack addict” (66) in a matter of moments). Tess makes this criticism explicit when she points out that “This is so racist” (73), and quickly makes her liberal denial plain through her immediate, kneejerk declaration that “This is not racist!” (73). This exchange may also be read as a sly, knowing comment on the play itself, with its single black character.
These unhappy family settings help make Paul seem more appealing to the other characters, at least until his “true” identity is revealed. It also goes some way towards explaining Paul’s own behavior. As the play progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that Paul is, in some respects, attempting to create a family that he himself lacks, both through claiming Poitier as his father and by using this to try and ingratiate himself with the various parents.
In part, Paul’s deception can be seen as an effort to gain a more opulent lifestyle than the one he was raised in, but it appears to also be a genuine search for connection with parental figures. Both of these readings connect up with another important theme: imagination. Paul talks at length about what he believes to be purpose of the imagination. As Poitier used to “conjure up” (22) worlds and lives for himself, for Paul, “the imagination is the place we are all trying to get to” (63). He uses it to learn his “limits and then how to grow beyond them” (62). He imagines a new persona and imagines himself in these wealthy couples’ homes in a surrogate child position and follows his imagination in an effort to get there and truly “transform the nightmare into dreams” (63).
