Empress Theresa: Final Chapter Analysis · 5:06pm May 26th, 2023
Here we are at the last chapter of this literary abortion. The world starts to panic as Theresa’s plan to put everyone into a deep sleep begins to gradually overtake the globe. However, Stinson and Blair, Theresa two biggest, lame-brained, lobotomized, numbnuts cheerleaders assure the entire world population that while it may seem like a bad thing, nothing that Theresa does can ever be bad, and that Theresa can only be good and do good. Why is this a good thing? Because Theresa needs time to figure out how to control the other HAL hosts! She is now looking into ways to control other people who might challenge her power. She has now become a complete tyrant. Even more than when she decided to take over the entire nation of North Korea. Stinson advises people who begin to notice sleep overtaking them to sit or lie down to prevent injury. She also mentions someone named Jack, who she is going to do such a thing with. Perhap Jack is her husband? Perhaps we’re supposed to think that Jack is the same Jack that Theresa dumped for Steve, and Boutin forgot that Jack was with a waitress named Ginny, and not President Veronica Stinson. Sounds like something he’d do.
For some reason, Theresa seems to still be the narrator of the story, even though she wasn’t there to hear about Stinson’s conversation with her advisors about how Theresa is great and must not be questioned. The only logical thing that we can possibly come up with is that Theresa used her privacy-intruding peeping Tom powers to spy on Stinson during that conversation. It is revealed in that conversation that Stinson’s biggest worry is that someone evil will be a HAL host. In Boutin’s mind, that means anyone who isn’t a white US citizen, but that’s besides the point.
It would be infinitely more interesting to see Theresa take on another HAL host who had been manipulating world events behind her back, making things go wrong and making her look bad. It would be an amazing twist if it were Theresa’s suspiciously absent sister who has been the villain this whole time. Like, if she were jealous of her perfect sister who had everything handed to her. Or even if it were Steve, who before Theresa joined the team, was the star pitcher on the boy’s high school baseball team, and has been resentful towards her ever since. What if Steve was actually even crazier, pettier, and emotionally and intellectually unbalanced than Theresa was, and he was a HAL host the whole time, and the story culminated with the two of them destroying each other, and HAL’s powers forever? That would leave the world a better place than when it started. But this is not what happens. That couldn’t happen, because Steve must be a submissive sissy boy.
The whole arch with the world going to sleep and ends with Stinson sleeping, and then waking up in the very next sentence. It seems that this new awakened world is much less exciting than the story of Rip van Winkle, because nothing really much has changed. People have been waking up for about three weeks now, and about six hundred years have passed since everyone conked out. Theresa has also extracted those pesky HALs from the other hosts. Only she may have the power. She may not be challenged. She’s also spent that whole time destroying the Earth’s landmasses by dividing them up and peppering them around the ocean into new homes. You’d think she’d have learned her lesson after the first time that went wrong. She also talked about how a lot of people would be killed if she did when they were around. We’re supposed to believe that she’s now able to do it without killing people. Because she’s so great. Now, why would she do any of this? None of us will ever know, because her reasons are never shown or told to us.
There is also a library filled with books that have been written by incredible super geniuses who are previously unknown to the world. And they are still unknown, because they have no names. Only numbers. Of course…Numbers…If Boutin could have his way, the entire language system would be replaced with numerical values. Stinson then cries when she learns that Theresa died hundreds of years ago.
Later on, Stinson gives a speech where she states that Blair told her that Theresa was never very popular. This statement is complete and utter bullshit. It is simply an effort by the author to make Theresa appear humble and likeable. We know this because we have seen crowd after crowd after pissing crowd gathering to praise Theresa for her greatness. We have seen Theresa snub her fans, and even set her goons on them. Even before the revelation of HAL, she was popular in school, she was so pretty that boys were afraid to ask her out. Stinson also states that Theresa also was a symbol for order, faith, kindness, hope, and a bunch of other things that she definitely would not inspire in real life. In real life, she’d be a symbol of terror, oppression and immaturity. There is then a toast to how perfect Theresa is. That is not a joke.
Some unspecified time later, there is an object detected on military radar. It is shaped like a coffin, and the narration tells us that it is not meant to ‘calm the nerves.’ Stinson doesn’t seem too worried, because she goes to bed, but asks to be woken up if anything happens with it.
The flying coffin keeps on flying. And boy are there a lot of numbers flying around with it to describe its size, speed, how many passengers it may have, its approximate temperature, how long it’s been flying. A lot of very unnecessary information that we don’t need to know as a reader. It then lands at the National Mall, where we get more numbers about how big it is and how many people gather there. I’m surprised we don’t know each individual person’s height, weight, age, body temperature and how many steps they walked to get there at this point.
Stinson arrives just in time to watch Theresa and Steve step out of the coffin. The crowd cheers their arrival, and they’re not alone. One hundred ten year olds follow them out into the crowd. It turns out that they aren’t really kids, but Theresa has simply kept them in a prepubescent stage of life so that they wouldn’t reproduce with each other. Strange how she didn’t just engineer them without sexual organs or make them sterile, instead of keeping them in a constant state of developmental immaturity. Suddenly there are two hundred children…wearing armbands. What? Is Theresa going to make everyone she doesn’t like wear a symbol too? Like how the Nazis made Jews wear a Star of David? Anyway, the armbands are different colors so that they all can signify their expertise. All of the girls look like Theresa and all of the boys look like Steve. Creepy. If that’s the case, and these are Steve and Theresa’s children, why would they assume incest would be a problem?
Oh, yeah. Theresa’s walking again now. She walks to the nearest podium, which is conveniently set up for seemingly no reason at all, and addresses the crowd. It is explained that Theresa’s HAL absorbed everyone else’s, and when Theresa dies, HAL will be absorbed into the Earth and never come back. All of the kids are actually adults who are hundreds of years old, and they are all the super geniuses who filled that library up with all that knowledge. The chapter closes with the promise that the world will be run by Theresa’s lineage for generations to come. What a horrible thought.
There is one more page with final thoughts from the author, who explains his rationale behind the nuclear execution in chapter four. He just thought it was an interesting ‘what if’ scenario. The rest of us didn’t think so. There’s also a bunch of explanations to the cultural references that are made here, such as the meaning of the name HAL, and certain references to The Hunger Games.
That’s it. Finally, the book is done! Thanks everyone for sticking with this to the end. I mentioned in the first entry that reading this book was like passing a kidney stone when comparing it to the most painful thing you’d ever endure. In fact, reading some chapters gave me horrible back pain and made it difficult to take a leak. However, I do feel more educated for having experienced it. I now know all the ways that I can make a book uninteresting, unengaging, and generally unpleasant. If you’re feeling brave, you can do your own analysis of the book as well to try and educate yourselves. You may even find a way to apply some of the points that I’ve talked about here.
This chapter was clearly supposed to be a way to tie up everything that’s happened with a neat, little bow. Unfortunately, there are still too many plot holes and loose ends that haven’t been addressed at all. What happened with OPEC, Israel, North Korea, and all those other major incidents? What happened to all of these people who were at the beginning of the story, and are completely absent by the middle? Why did Theresa never move Jerusalem, like she promised? Why were those water spouts never mentioned again? Is the climate of the entire world still dependent on them? Where the hell is Theresa’s sister this whole time!?
If there was any development to Theresa’s character, it would be her ascension into a tyrant. I’ve defined tyranny in one of my earlier analyses, and compared her to Satan from Dante’s Inferno, and it all rings true. We already know that she’s full of herself by age ten. By age eighteen, nobody may question her motives, nobody may speak to her without permission, she may be given the highest possible military rank without any merits, and she may rule an entire country without knowing how. In a good story, Theresa would be a villain. Characters like Connie McKesson would make a much more believable and well-rounded hero.
The dialogue was as basic and bland as it could have possibly gotten. All of the characters sounded the same, as if Boutin were talking through each and every one of them. A good author would be able to make a British character sound British without phonetically typing their accent, but Boutin doesn’t even attempt that. Characters like Blair just talk like Boutin would.
Probably the saddest thing about the plot was that nothing between the nuke and the worldwide coma had any effect on the actual story. We got nearly no information about HAL, and anything that we did get was conveyed to us in the most boring, bland way possible by having Theresa tell us at a press conference. It is always much more interesting to have things shown to an audience, instead of being told. The wind stopping could have been the main conflict throughout the entire book, but it’s just treated like a short episode in Theresa’s series of greatness. Most jarring of all is her archaeological expeditions, which serve no purpose but to show how much Boutin’s been watching BBC documentaries lately.
And the numbers…Those piss-reeking numbers that were so prevalent throughout this entire book! I use basic geometry in my job, and I don’t see so many numbers in a single day as I did in some of these chapters! If I had to guess, it was because Boutin couldn’t think of a more interesting or engaging way to offer descriptions of a scene, instead relying on exact increments of unnecessary information.
My dad took a film analysis class as an elective in college. One of the things he took with him from that course was that to be a good critic, you must also be a good audience member. This means that you must go in trying to understand who, or what audience the media is intended for. Empress Theresa appears to have been made for nobody but Norman Boutin as a way to show what a good person he is, and how he would solve any major world events. If this book was made for anyone else, it would be for anyone who has ever been mean to him or who he perceives to have been mean to him. The sheer amount of lecturing, preaching, soapboxing and grandstanding is enough to make you roll your eyes and read something more interesting.
In the end, this book is only worth your time as educational material on how not to write a book. And to get the whole picture, you must read the entire thing. Feeling brave?
Theresa affects the world around her like a black hole.
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Oh yeah. She sucks it all into a dark void of terrifying blandness from which there is no return.
I have to agree with the analysis here. There were so many loose ends and missed opportunities for more compelling storytelling. It's interesting to see the perspective on Theresa's character arc, especially considering the lack of depth in her dialogue and actions. I recently wrote an essay analyzing a similar theme in a different book, and I couldn't help but notice some parallels. I found some helpful insights on Essays.EduBirdie.com, when I was struggling with my analysis. Personally, I prefer to pay for essay at professional writing services. It streamlines the process and ensures quality work. It's always good to seek out resources when tackling challenging topics. Anyway, thanks for sharing your thoughts on this final chapter!
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No problem. What did you think of me comparing Theresa to The Divine Comedy's portrayal of Satan? That one just kind of hit me out of the blue, to be honest.