Playground: A Novel

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024

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Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Pages 1-48

Pages 49-136

Pages 137-206

Pages 207-299

Pages 300-381

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Themes

The Desire to Resurrect the Dead

Content Warning: This section refers to intimate partner violence.

As a young man, Rafi reads The Philosophy of the Common Task by Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov, which concerns the human potential to resurrect the dead. The suggestion appeals to Rafi because he carries guilt that he’s desperate to address: He blames himself for both his parents’ separation and his younger sister’s death (when she fell down a flight of stairs after arguing with their mother’s partner on Rafi’s behalf and fleeing the house). Intellectually, Rafi knows his guilt is irrational; emotionally, however, he can’t shake the burden. If he could somehow resurrect his sister, he could seek her forgiveness. Resurrecting the dead alludes to a potential to change the past, to repair the emotional fissures that seem irreparable. Rafi’s guilt weighs so heavily on him that he feels a need to succeed, as if his world-altering success might somehow be a fitting tribute to his lost sister.

Fyodorov frames the raising of the dead as a potential endpoint for human technological development. Technology, Fyodorov suggests, will one day advance enough to make the impossible possible. Striving toward the impossible isn’t only important on the individual level, offering salvation and catharsis to people like Rafi, but it also gives society an organizing principle. Playground keeps Fyodorov’s “common task” deliberately vague because it functions on multiple levels. Rafi, in his quest to assuage his guilt, wants to do more than just accomplish personal achievements: He wants to unify society toward a common goal, somehow addressing the alienation that he witnesses all around him. He wants to heal the world, thereby healing himself. The prospect of a common goal, such as the quest to raise the dead, gives humanity a goal. If everyone could unite to achieve this goal, then people would feel purpose in their lives again. Rafi sees much of himself in a society that bears the pain of the past. Through his writing, he hopes to inspire the world to work together to heal this pain. Unfortunately, this responsibility becomes yet another burden for Rafi. He becomes lost in a fog of edits and revisions, losing himself in the process because he doesn’t know how to achieve his goal. The irony of Rafi’s social project is that in trying to share the idea of the common task, he becomes consumed by personal demons. In trying to fix the world, Rafi damages himself.

Rafi may be obsessed with raising the dead on an intellectual level, but his friend Todd turns the obsession into his life’s work. Todd, however, doesn’t understand Fyodorov’s “common task” in the same way. He tries to use his computer programming talents to raise the dead through AI. He does this in a deeply individual way, hoping that raising Rafi from the dead can bring him catharsis for how their friendship ended. Whereas Rafi sought to heal society, unifying it through a common goal, Todd seeks to heal himself, working privately on his project. Todd understands the quest to resurrect the dead in a literal rather than a figurative way. He doesn’t understand Rafi’s grand ambition, partly because he never even reads Fyodorov himself. The contrast between Rafi's and Todd’s conception of resurrection plays into the novel’s ideas about duality. Like the white-and-black counters in the game of Go, they’re both the same and different. Todd is an individualistic literalist who raises the dead, while Rafi is an unselfish dreamer who understands that the shared project of resurrection is more important than the resurrection itself. Both men die before realizing their goals. Even while Todd animates AI versions of his dead friends, he realizes that nothing can resurrect them entirely.

The Difficulty of Escaping Cycles of Violence

The characters in Playground are trapped in cycles of violence. This is most evident in the depiction of Todd and Rafi, whose parents’ marriages were mired in conflict and violence. Rafi blames himself for his parents’ separation, even though his father was physically abusive to his mother. This depiction of domestic violence (and particularly how Rafi blames himself) shows the extent to which the violence of his past traps him. Even though his father is to blame, Rafi bears false guilt for the rest of his life. Todd’s father was emotionally abusive to his mother and was rarely faithful to his wife, and he hid the true state of the family’s finances from her as he cycled through self-destructive tendencies. When he died in a car accident, the family lost their comfortable lifestyle and realized the extent of his lies. Todd’s mother refuses to address her dead husband’s abusive tendencies. When Todd tries to talk about the issue, she rebukes him. Both Todd and Rafi are trapped in false prisons of violence and abuse, which their parents constructed. Their lives are shaped by the violence that precedes them, and later in their lives the violence and abuse they encounter largely stems from their early family environments.

The cycles of violence that the novel portrays operate beyond the individual. The island of Makatea has a history of colonial violence. The small nation is part of French Polynesia, a colonial framework that imposes a Western idea of nationhood on a group of islands that have been home to Indigenous people for thousands of years. The colonial powers came to Makatea to extract phosphates, disrupting the island’s ecology and leaving many scars (physical, geographical, and emotional). Makatea isn’t unique in this respect. Many residents left nearby islands due to the effects of French atomic testing. These tests equipped France with atomic bombs but left the people of French Polynesia with radioactive fallout, environmental destruction, and long-lasting health concerns. Even if Makatea is beginning to heal, the arrival of the US consortium heralds the next cycle of colonial violence that will affect the island. From mining to atomic bombs to capitalistic exploitation, Makatea has experienced cycles of colonial violence. Even when the island’s residents are aware of the cycles, they can’t escape. They vote in favor of the US consortium, convincing themselves that this time things will be different.

Rafi is aware of the violence that governs his life. Through his reading, he discovers Albert Camus’s interpretation of The Myth of Sisyphus, in which the classical figure finds meaning in the repeated task of pushing a bolder up a hill each day. Rafi feels like Sisyphus, caught in a cycle of pain he can’t escape. Like Camus, Rafi learns to read meaning into the cycles that trap him. He’s so aware of them that he tries to describe them in his poems. Each revision of a poem returns to the violence of his youth, revisiting and perpetuating the violence he can’t escape. Rafi hopes his self-awareness will enable him to escape his guilt, but it doesn’t. His paranoia and fear of being vulnerable lead him to end his friendship with Todd and his relationship with Ina. He dies alone, fired from the university library and unable to save even the most unremarkable book from being destroyed. Rafi tried to describe and thus break the cycles of violence, only to be consumed by the corrosive negative emotion that affected him throughout his life. After blaming himself for his parents’ separation and his sister’s death, after feeling betrayed by Todd and Ina, he couldn’t muster the energy or ability to shatter the cycles, so he ultimately became beholden to them. His failure to break free from the cycles of violence that shaped his life becomes central to the novel.

Life as a Competition

Rafi and Todd inherited their fathers’ competitive natures. For different reasons, their fathers were men who waged war against the world around them. Rafi’s father, Donald, experienced racism as an African American man, so he trained his son to academically excel and outdo his white classmates. Todd’s father, Michael, was addicted to self-destruction, whether in the form of prescription pills, infidelity, or irresponsible spending. His self-destructive tendencies manifested in his conviction that a hypercompetitive nature was essential, so he taught his son to compete fiercely at board games. When Rafi and Todd met, they recognized their shared competitiveness, even if they didn’t quite comprehend the extent to which their fathers imbued this personality trait in them. They competed with one another, teaching each other increasingly complicated games until they knew one another better than anyone else. Rafi and Todd bonded through their shared tendency to treat life as a competition, a tendency that originated in their pasts and shaped their futures.

Todd developed an early version of Playground that was highly appealing to users. When he discussed the project with Rafi, however, Playground took on a whole new life. They used their understanding of competition and games to weaponize the website. Informed by their competitive natures, they made a simple idea extremely compelling to users. Since they spent so long competing against one another, they had a strong sense of the mechanics of competition, which they then implemented to make Playground as addictive as possible. This discussion was the pinnacle of their friendship, the high point at which they were most explicit about the shared competitiveness that bound them together. After this high point, however, everything collapsed. Their friendship was never as close, even before the point when it permanently ruptured. Playground, however, was a lasting memorial to their sense of life as a competition. Playground became a behemoth, and each additional user vindicated their competitiveness. Tellingly, even after the breakup of their friendship, Rafi couldn’t stay away from Playground. He wasn’t just an active user; he was one of the site’s minor celebrities. Their friendship may have been over, but both Todd and Rafi lingered in their shared memorial of a competitive vision of the world.

Rafi couldn’t quite stop competing against Todd because for many years, Todd was Rafi’s proxy for his father’s vision of an attritional society. Donald wanted his son to triumph as an African American man over a white society, but Rafi was satisfied to defeat Todd as a measure of how closely he could follow his father’s vision. After ending the friendship, however, Rafi lacked something in his life. He missed Todd largely because of their competition but was too proud to apologize. His instinct, therefore, was to raise the stakes of the game. He sent Todd an unexpected message, requesting compensation for his role in creating Playground. Todd was taken aback but later realized that this was just the latest move in a game he didn’t realize he was playing. Todd and Rafi always talked in the language of competition. Whether playing chess or Go or making plans for Playground, competition was what brought them together. Though Rafi couldn’t admit that he missed his friend, he could admit that he missed their competition. Fittingly, the final communications between them were competitive. They finally succeeded in turning everything about their lives into a game. Even more fittingly, neither felt as though he’d won. The result didn’t matter: Each only craved more competition, a craving that Rafi’s death tragically denied them. Todd tried to recreate Rafi via AI, attempting to play one last game, but even this didn’t satisfy him. Life was a competition in which death couldn’t compete.