53 pages • 1 hour read
Torrey MaldonadoTight
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Wages of Violence
Maldonaldo’s novel Tight, whose title is slang that can mean either “cool and good” or “angry and frustrated,” dramatizes the various ways in which young boys try to exhibit “cool” behavior and thereby create situations in which anger or stress causes them to explode into physical violence: a release that may feel satisfying in the short term but is ultimately harmful and self-destructive. Through the actions of its father-and-son characters, Joe and Bryan, Tight explores the futility of violence both as a pattern of behavior and as an isolated impulse. Joe, the protagonist’s father, has been incarcerated several times for assault and battery, yet he shows little awareness of how his own behavior patterns have harmed his life and his family relationships; indeed, one of the few pieces of advice he offers his son is the Machiavellian maxim that being feared is better than being liked. Throughout the novel, he commits at least two assaults, neither of which can be justified as self-defense, and lands in jail again, an occurrence that devastates his family and sends his son into a self-destructive spiral in which he actively embraces Mike’s harmful influences. After Bryan’s ongoing conflicts with Mike finally lead him to physically attack the boy and beat him severely, Joe expresses pride in his son, boasting that Bryan has inherited his “temper.” His callous delight in his son’s show of violence is fortunately countered by Bryan’s mother and sister, who admonish Bryan for following in his father’s violent footsteps. Aside from the possibility of jail, which would seriously impact his family and his prospects in life as it has for his father, Bryan’s own fight puts him in danger from retribution at the hands of Mike’s friends, who are known to be troublemakers. Additionally, if his father involves himself in this conflict, it could land him back in jail yet again, further hurting the family. Luckily, Bryan’s sister acts as a peacemaker, talking Mike down and calming him, which she says is what Bryan should have done to begin with.
In the comic books that Bryan looks to as a guide for navigating life’s moral complexities, the violence inherent to superheroes such as the musclebound Luke Cage rarely has negative consequences, and for a while, Bryan reveres the strong, violent heroes over the smart ones (such as Batman or Black Panther), even dreaming of being impervious to bullies and to pain. Although winning his fight with Mike is initially exhilarating, he soon listens to his mother and sister, who remind him that life is not a comic book. Not wanting his father’s legacy to become his own, he learns to reject his father’s impulsive, macho philosophy in favor of his mother and sister’s pacifist approach, which counsels patience and “talk[ing] it out” (177). He comes to see that there are better ways of earning respect than by being “feared” for a violent temper and decides that the smart superheroes who think ahead might be the ones to follow after all.
The Role of Peer Pressure in Identity Formation
As children graduate from elementary to middle school, peer pressure intensifies considerably, and both the subtle and direct influences of friends, acquaintances, and role models have a significant effect on the development of their values, beliefs, habits, and behavior. Typically, these years are a time of heightened self-consciousness and experimentation, when children seek to establish an identity for themselves outside of their family circle and win the acceptance of their peers, largely by looking to others for cues as to how to behave and “fit in.” Bryan, Tight’s sixth-grader protagonist, grapples with various forms of peer pressure that pull him in opposing directions; most of the action of Tight charts his often halting navigation of these pressures, each of which comes with its own temptations, rewards, and pitfalls.
Bryan’s lack of friends worsens his social anxiety and increases the urgency of his search for suitable friends, for until recently, he has not been allowed to have friends at all. His mother, concerned about the harmful effects that peer pressure have had on her husband, urges Bryan to focus on academics rather than relationships. However, when Bryan enters the sixth grade, she introduces him to a boy named Mike whose good grades seem to her to be a mark of equally good character. The irony is that many children of Bryan’s age, eager to form their own identities and establish independence from their parents, create more than one identity for themselves: one to placate the adults in their lives, and another to impress peers of their own age group. Mike’s peer pressure on Bryan therefore turns out to be the worst kind—the same sort that has repeatedly led Bryan’s own father astray and gotten him into trouble with the law.
When Mike draws Bryan into misbehavior that starts mildly and soon accelerates to illegal activities such as hopping the subway turnstile and “train-surfing,” Bryan suppresses his instinctual wariness of such behavior and goes along with Mike for the sake of enjoying the excitement and toughening his own public image. This new philosophy becomes even more dominant in his mind after his own father goes back to jail, for in this father’s absence, Bryan believes that he needs to be stronger to function. (The author also makes it clear, however, that even his father’s arrest is the result of peer pressure from his own false friend, Alex, thus reinforcing the ongoing theme of peer pressure as a negative social influence that often causes people to make bad decisions.)
However, not all of the peer pressure in Bryan’s life is negative. His sister Ava, when not teasing him as a “momma’s boy,” counsels him to think ahead (and always talk things out) before resorting to violence; and his friend Big Will shows him, through his own example, how to avoid conflicts and to calm down potential troublemakers. Bryan’s classmate Melanie, whose good opinion he seeks, exerts a subtler pressure, mainly through the looks she gives him: a “stank face” when she disapproves of his and Mike’s behavior, or a friendly smile when Bryan is being nice to Kamau or Big Will. Bryan eventually embraces the wisdom of these positive influences, which lead him back to “feeling closer to who I should be and closer to who I am” (148).
Charting a Course Through Family Dynamics
As the anchor of a young person’s sense of security, identity, and socialization, the importance of family, especially in childhood and adolescence, cannot be overstated. Through example and other forms of guidance, parents and older siblings have the power to help influence a child’s ethical and moral characteristics for the better by encouraging problem-solving skills and self-control and increasing the child’s ability to interact positively with others. However, as the main plotline of Tight suggests, this guidance can sometimes be inconsistent and even contradictory. Bryan’s mother and father, for instance, clearly have different ideas about how he should deal with other boys, especially bullies. Likewise, his sister sends him mixed signals as well, first teasing him for being “soft” and cowardly in his doubts about his new friend Mike, and then scolding him for getting into a fight and winning when that same friend’s behavior becomes intolerable.
As the story unfolds, Bryan feels torn between the often conflicting expectations of his parents, because he has strong attachments to each and yearns for their approval. His father, Joe, who has been in jail several times and is revered in the neighborhood for his tough reputation, pays him very little attention, and Bryan savors any morsel of respect he can glean from his largely absentee father. His troubled relationship with Mike also illustrates similar characteristics, for just as Bryan eagerly laps up any affection that his father chooses to show him, he also desperately seeks Mike’s approval and ultimately sacrifices his own safety and integrity in order to gain the older boy’s good opinion of him. Family dynamics also play a direct role in this trend, for because Bryan’s father encourages the friendship between the boys, Bryan has an additional motivation for allowing Mike into this life. In the end, Bryan’s father demonstrates his own moral shortcomings by expressing pride in Bryan’s show of violence when he fights with Mike and wins; at this point in the story, the flaws in Joe’s approach to life become abundantly clear. His father has told him that it is better to be feared than to be liked, and Bryan has followed his example by “exploding” into violence, as his father has so often done.
On the other hand, Bryan feels a deep bond with his mother, who has always shown him more affection and attention than his father, and whose preference for peace and tranquility is an attribute that he shares. However, this bond is threatened and complicated by his desire to please her by continuing to see Mike, whom she believes to be a good influence, blinded as she is to his true troublemaking ways. Thus, Bryan’s love and respect for his parents and sister, and his desire to follow their advice and examples, have trapped him in multiple dilemmas. The counsel offered by his mother and sister—to think ahead and always talk things out—differs considerably from his father’s; but in the end, Bryan finds his way out of this cognitive dissonance by rejecting the troublesome influences in his life and embracing his mother’s love of peace once again. Ironically, he does this partly to protect his father, who could go to jail again if he becomes involved in Bryan’s quarrel. To be “tough” and feared, his mother and sister tell him, is at best a short-term solution. As Tight illustrates, a family is a complex unit whose guidance is not always clear-cut, for each individual in the family must grapple with confusing, incongruous messages to find the best path forward.
