Wilbur's Slapstick Summary

While reading Slapstick, I noticed two distinct ideas that were displayed throughout the text, the human need for a community and family, but also, on the same token, a need for individuality. The main flashback story revolves around the dysfunctional family of Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain and his deformed sister, Eliza. In their youth, the mutated children went about their simple and blissful lives in the mansion of their parents, who believed that they were Neanderthals. This nuclear family eventually fell apart when the intelligence of the two was revealed on Wilbur’s fifteenth birthday. While the family was far from exemplary, Wilbur wrote later in his life that he had seen, though only for a short time, his mother as just that, a mother. Other examples of families are the large government-given families instituted by Wilbur, as the last President of the United States, which became a positive element in the post-apocalyptic America, and the Manhattan fish-eating clan, the Raspberries, who found the cure to the Green Death. The central idea for the need for a community, in my opinion, originates

In the supposed future, the nation of China raised children to be a part of a larger thinking commune, which lessened their individuality, but also, physically shrank their people to be microscopic, so as to take up less space. These shrunken people eventually caused the Green Death, which literally killed people, but also, in a metaphorical sense, did so as well. In the end, the native fish of Manhattan Island, the Island of Death, when consumed corrected the disease. Although traveling in large schools, fish are their own individual entities, choosing where to travel and feed. The meaning that I found in this was, that although a person needs a community of others to help guide and support them, the person must remain an individual being, rather than