Full Tilt

“Seven years old, spinning out of control. My first ride…No! I told myself. No, I would not go there. I wouldn’t think about it. I pushed the memory down so keep, not even the Kamikaze could shake it loose.” 

The Kamikaze triggers many of Blake’s fears, which takes him back to the bus crash. This is the first glimpse at the tragedy, and it is the first time Blake refuses to face his trauma. Even the coaster, which terrifies him, is less scary to Blake than his memory of the crash. Allowing himself to think about the crash is Blake’s key to survival.

“Until now all I had from the university was an acceptance letter and a dozen forms to fill out. But here, spread out before me, was solid reality on a collision course with me.” 

Blake sees college as a concept until Carl gifts him the envelope. His hesitation about attending Columbia becomes something concrete. The physical evidence of his future plans signals a moment of change; Blake fears change because it involves risk. Shusterman’s use of the phrase “collision course” evokes imagery of the bus crash, the trauma of which threatens to limit Blake’s potential.

“…I could never reach out to Quinn, because although he was only a few feet away, he somehow felt much farther than the space between us. When Dad left us all those years ago, it tore open a wound that led to a whole lot of unexpected dimensions.” 

While much of the novel revolves around Blake’s trauma related to the bus accident, the rift between him and Quinn stems from a different source. Their opposing personalities result from different reactions to their father abandoning them. Rather than reconcile and support one another—in other words, rather than create balance in their father’s absence—they repel one another. The reference to multiple dimensions illustrates the depth of that rift; it also foreshadows the nature of the park rides, which appear to exist in concurrent but different dimensions.

“The crevasse was a fog-filled rift, glowing with colored lights. I could smell cotton candy and popcorn. I could hear the sound of grinding gears, punctuated by the ghostly echoes of screaming riders. In the center of the breach I could see the very top of a Ferris wheel rising above the fog, churning the moonlit mist like a riverboat paddle.” 

Blake narrates the setting of the park. This informs the supernatural element of the story and creates an unnerving ambiance for Blake and his friends. Words such as “ghostly” and “moonlit” counter the fun imagery of a carnival, which parallels the way Blake sees the rides versus the way other riders see them. For him, the experience is terrifying; others appear to love the rides. Setting the carnival in a misty quarry evokes Blake’s memory of the school bus, which slid over the side of a cliff.

“If we stepped through the gate, I knew the last threads of sanity that bound together the world we knew, the real world, would pull part. I could almost feel my fingers holding tightly on those threads, ready to pull them and make them all unravel.”

Blake chooses to follow Quinn into the park, but this is the first time he understands the true stakes of his decision. Blake lives his life by strict rules and tidiness. He knows that accepting this journey means losing those constants. Though Blake has not yet discovered it for himself, this decision reveals that at least some inner strength exists in him already.

“Here, it seemed muscle wasn’t made of flesh and blood; it was made of will and anger. And at that moment I had enough strength to hurl him into the eclipsed sun.” 

Blake’s strength contrasts with Russ’s after the first ride. Shusterman paints Russ as externally strong from the beginning. Blake is a more thoughtful, mentally strong character. The strength that Russ possesses in the real world is not helpful to him in the park. Blake, however, begins to recognize that his inner strength—here, his will and anger—outmatches even Russ.

“I finally got the picture. Die on the ride and you’re part of the scenery. Get caught alive and you’re a slave of the park.” 

Blake learns the stakes of the park rides. While the cashier initially explained the rules, Blake only now realizes their treacherous nature. This sets a more aggressive timeline for Blake and pushes him to make bolder decisions. The rules of the park also seem to match up with Quinn’s view of life. If you die, you’re left behind; if you are alive, you are not in control. Blake betrays his similar fears in later sections.

“What could I say to my brother, who came here not just for the thrills, but for something else? As much as I didn’t want to face it, I had to now. Somehow he knew where these rides would end. He knew that once he crossed through the gates, he wasn’t coming back.”

Blake learns that Quinn is suicidal—or, at the very least, has no intention of escaping the park. This gives Quinn more depth and presents a larger obstacle for Blake to overcome. Quinn isn’t simply in the park having fun. The thrill of risk dictates his actions just as caution dictates Blake’s. Blake decides to face Quinn’s insecurities directly—something Blake cannot do with his own trauma.

“I’ve always suspected my life—maybe everyone’s life—is like an hourglass, in which the past and the future converge on a single point in time […] A single event that defines who you are. Until now I had thought that the bus accident was that event for me; yet here was a moment not of blind helplessness, but of decision.”

Blake allows the trauma of the accident to define him. Every choice he makes before arriving at the park is based on his avoidance of that trauma. Here, though, he chooses to relieve the burden of that moment. Instead, he focuses on the present and the choices it puts before him. Blake later remembers that the accident itself was a moment of decision—that his helplessness was an illusion.

“…there are some [rides] we ride together. Either we find ourselves drawn to some common experience, or maybe we’re pulled in by the people we care about […] But in the end, no matter whose rides we find ourselves on, the experience is all our own.” 

This quote parallels the structure of Blake’s journey. He has been pulled into experiences by his family and friends, but few of them have been the results of his own choices. In other words, he has been riding other people’s rides rather than his own. Blake realizes that even if he loves Quinn, his mother, and his friends, he cannot continue joining their journeys. Regardless of whether he survives the park, Blake will have to do so alone. 

“I guess we all can’t help peeking at our own imperfections […] When those imperfections are pasted across your face like that, exaggerated and magnified, it’s hard to find all those good thoughts you have about yourself. If you believe those distorted reflections too deeply, you’ll never get out of the maze.” 

Blake and Maggie spend time in the mirror maze together because they both lack self-confidence. Blake avoids decision-making and action because of it; for Maggie, it relates to her self-image. From her introduction in the story, Maggie worries that she is ugly or overweight. Blake understands the trick of the maze, though. If he obsesses over the parts of himself that he dislikes rather than finding his inner strength, he will be too afraid to step through the mirrors and escape. This eventually causes Maggie to hesitate in their escape, and she is left behind. 

“I guess lots of people would look at you and run, like Russ. But to have someone who won’t run—someone who won’t use your shame against you—that takes someone special. Having that person with you in the worst part of the maze makes all the difference.” 

Whereas Russ abandons Maggie in the maze, Blake chooses to stay and comfort her. There are hints that Blake has romantic feelings for Maggie. This quote touches on those specific feelings while addressing the novel’s larger ideas. For example, Blake and Quinn could not maintain their strong brotherhood after their father left. Blake was alone at one of the “worst part[s] of the maze.” Similarly, he later remembers that he was alone after the bus slid over the cliff. Here, he makes the active decision to stay with Maggie, ensuring neither of them faces the challenge of the maze alone.

“To be completely helpless in the face of life—powerless to do a single thing—that’s what I’d always feared more than anything. It was like I’d been keeping all the edges of my life neat and clean, pretending the neatness was all that mattered, pretending that life could somehow be controlled.” 

Blake is full of fear and neuroses, but this quote demonstrates the trauma that exists at his core. Beyond flying or amusement park rides—or even college—Blake is afraid that his life is not within his control. His journey through the park is about embracing both ends of that spectrum. He gains control of his destiny by accepting pain and trauma; by ignoring them, he was giving away his inner power. 

“Once more this place had tapped into my secret fears. Fear of flying, fear of falling, but even worse than that, the fear of taking everyone down with me.” 

Blake continues to reexamine his fears. Until this point, he was afraid of concrete things: airplanes, roller coasters, and car accidents. The park allows him to explore the deeper roots of those fears. It is not his own life that he worries about. On the contrary, Blake believes that his decisions will come from a place of selfishness and hurt others. Subconsciously, he knows that saving himself from the bus caused it to lose balance and fall. He believes that repeating this decision in the form of going to college, for example, will inevitably hurt those around him.

“It just keeps growing and growing, because the body doesn’t know how to wage war against itself. That’s the way the park worked. It dug into your thoughts and pulled these worlds right out of them.”

While Blake already knows that the park uses his thoughts and memories to build its rides, he speaks here to the difficulty of facing trauma. Again, his journey is not about forgetting his trauma but facing and accepting it. Because this conflict is completely internal, it is more difficult for him to do so. He doesn’t know how to attack his inner turmoil, which is his goal. Blake learns more about how the park and its rides work—including how to outsmart them—but cannot escape without facing his fears.

“He was so full of this fantasy—so drunk on it—that I didn’t know if there was any way to reach him […] I can’t save you, Quinn. I can’t save you from yourself.” 

As Blake’s journey continues, he finds himself facing his obstacles alone more often. By the time Blake and Quinn reunite, Blake understands the significance of this. His internal struggles are more difficult to overcome than the external ones because he must fight them alone. Quinn is in a similar predicament: If he cannot face his shortcomings and mortality, Blake cannot free him from the park.

“There was a gap there. I always knew it was there, but since no one ever discussed the crash, it was easy to ignore […] The concussion erased my memory of the trauma, and that was that. Why did it matter?” 

The obscure events of the bus accident illustrate Blake’s unwillingness to face the memory of the tragedy. Blake acknowledges that he ignores the memories for the most part; if he plans to loosen the grip of trauma on his life, he can no longer ignore it.

“Once he was free, he left. Simple as that. Just like he did all those years ago. No apologies, no thank-yous, no good-byes. Still, it didn’t change the choice I made to let him go.” 

Blake is trapped in a dungeon with his father, a metaphor for the impact of his father’s abandonment. In his real life, Blake has not recovered from this; thoughts of his father are stuck in his head. Often, he cannot avoid them. Similarly, he is physically stuck with his father on the ride. Here, he cannot ignore his pain because it is right in front of him. Blake knows he must make a choice. He decides on mercy for his father—not forgiving him but allowing his memory to become more distant. 

“…I will never forget The Works. That will live on in my nightmares. I will feel its grinding metallic teeth every time I see scenes of war, or a plane crash, or some other disaster on the news, too terrible to watch but too riveting to look away from […] Cassandra did not build The Works. We’re the ones who built it.” 

Despite the horrors of the park’s rides, Blake is most terrified of The Works. The mechanical belly of the park symbolizes his life. He fears becoming trapped in a boring life, a fate that befell past riders who found themselves melded with levers and gears. The Works terrifies Blake because it is the manifestation of all of his fears—more specifically, of the way they take control away from him. 

“This minefield had been perfectly, strategically placed to cause the most damage if Quinn and I followed our normal patterns of behavior when we encountered it. So much of my life had been under tight control. So much of Quinn’s life had been wild insanity. What we needed now was both: a directed burst of controlled insanity.” 

Blake journeys to seek balance both internally and externally. Internally, he must live with his painful memories without allowing them to consume him. Externally, this balance is most often related to Quinn. Their personalities are extreme opposites, and both are too stubborn to show flexibility. To survive the final ride, Blake must cross the divide between himself and Quinn—the dimensions between them—and find a middle ground. 

“I put my hands up in the air. Way up, like you’re supposed to do on the fastest, wildest roller coaster. I looked to Quinn and grinned. He nodded and put his hands up in the air as well […] I think that was the moment I really found my brother.” 

Blake signals his growth away from fear. The Kamikaze terrified Blake in the novel’s second chapter, but readers see a different reaction here. In a literal sense, Blake lets go of safety. He accepts risk and chaos. This ingratiates him to Quinn, who wishes for Blake to take chances. Quinn has similarly moved away from pure risk, putting him on the same middle ground as Blake.

“I’ve always been on this ride […] It has dominated my life, playing in my dreams, my daydreams, and every thought I have. This is how Cassandra can trap me—because, in a way, I never left this bus. I’ve been riding since I was seven years old.” 

Blake acknowledges his trauma directly. A protagonist’s journey prepares one to confront one’s biggest weaknesses. Blake’s weakness was allowing his fear to prevent action. Blake states that directly here; he knows that if he doesn’t confront his tragic past, it will never allow him independence. While he physically survived the accident, its emotional toll on him has led to his stagnation. 

“That terrified little boy somehow found it in himself to leap from the back of the doomed bus. Even though no one else jumped with him. Even though he knew he’d be the only one out. Even with the burden of guilt he would have to bear, he—I—still chose to live.” 

Inaction cripples 16-year-old Blake. He allows the external world to dictate his decisions to him. He assumes that this has always been the case—that factors out of his control caused the accident and his deepest trauma. While that is true, he learns something else in the novel’s climax: In that moment of external peril, he chose to act. Even then, he was not helpless. Though this action led to survivor’s remorse and long-lasting fear, it kept him alive. He overcame fear once before, therefore Blake does not create inner strength on his journey—he rediscovers it.