40 pages • 1 hour read
Blake CrouchUpgrade
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A 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
Ethical Implications of Genetic Engineering
Content Warning: The source material includes discussion of suicide.
The novel lays out a framework for exploring the ethical limits of genetic engineering. The dilemma examined throughout the novel rests on the conclusion that unless some intervention is undertaken, humanity faces extinction as a result of climate change. The novel takes place somewhere in the “mid-twenty-first century” (196), and as the narrative unfolds, there are many indications that humans are already facing the beginning stages of climate-induced catastrophe. One of the more glaring examples of this is a flooded and abandoned Lower Manhattan, where the novel’s penultimate scene takes place.
Working from this conclusion, the novel poses two questions, which are exemplified by Logan’s and Kara’s missions. When faced with extinction, is it permissible to genetically alter human beings without their consent to save the species? Is the potential reward of saving the species worth the risk of killing a large percentage of it? After Logan and Kara discover their dead mother and view her recorded message, they position themselves on opposite poles. Kara adopts the position that it is ethically justifiable to kill a billion people if it means saving the remaining nine billion. While Logan does accept the potential of genetic modification to do good, he does not share this utilitarian perspective; he sees any genetic modification that ultimately kills people as antithetical to the cause. In Logan’s own words, “You can’t kill humanity to save humanity. Human beings are not a means to an end” (320). Logan’s position demonstrates concern for actual human life in the present moment rather than viewing humanity in terms of net numbers.
The plot’s rising action hinges on which of these two viewpoints will win out in the end. Logan’s mission to stop his sister from enacting her plan creates much of the novel’s suspense, and when the plot is resolved in Chapter 15, it is in Logan’s favor. However, Logan’s view is not devoid of moral conflict. In the Epilogue, Logan explores a possible synthesis of the binary created in the plot by genetically modifying our evolutionarily coded limitations on compassion—fusing his belief in the importance of emotion with Kara’s rationale that survival isn’t possible without genetic engineering. While at first glance he seems to be acting in alignment with his own ethical code, as he’s not proposing an upgrade that necessitates casualties, he is raising another ethical dilemma: Is it acceptable to alter the human genome without informed consent, which the people will not have when Logan disperses the upgrade, if it means saving the species? In the end, the novel suggests that it is indeed acceptable if it means saving the species from extinction.
Restricted Freedom Versus Liberty as a Human Right
Logan’s imprisonment, which begins in Chapter 4 when his upgrade is discovered by the GPA, is an injustice in his mind. He has committed no crime, has passed a high-tech lie detector test, and argues that he is being detained against his will. He even suffers torture in which oxygen is withheld from him to force his cooperation. In a less direct way, the GPA also inflicts insurmountable damage when they inform his wife and daughter that he has been killed in a raid. It could be argued that the emotional trauma suffered by Logan and his family is the worst form of torture of all, ongoing and irreversible as it is. In Logan’s view, the government, represented by the GPA, has no right to do what they are doing.
However, from the government’s perspective, Logan’s condition is entirely novel and presents a serious threat to the life and liberty of its citizens. The GPA has no real idea what has happened to him, nor do they have any sense of whether what he has can be passed to other unsuspecting victims. The urgent need to learn about his condition overrules his human rights; they have an obligation to protect the wider population, so his detainment serves a larger purpose. A similar dynamic unfolds in the town of Glasgow when an outbreak of an unknown disease takes place. The layers of patrol around the town create a cell that prevents escape, much in the way Logan is confined in the glass cell. The purpose, again, is to prevent the unknown disease from spreading, especially before scientists understand the nature of the disease. Like Logan, the victims in Glasgow are all innocent. They did not commit crimes, yet they are being held against their will in an enforced quarantine.
Once again, the actions of the government raise ethical issues surrounding whether it is just to imprison people, even though they are innocent, if the reason is to mitigate the risk of wider exposure to a disease. At the end of the novel, Logan implores Edwin to treat Nadine better than he himself was treated. He insists that she should not be caged in a cell. Though she has been afflicted with the same upgrade as Logan, an important distinction is that Logan was patient zero. This suggests that imprisonment and forced quarantine are more flagrant violations of human rights if the urgency to understand and contain the condition has passed.
Coping with Emotional Trauma
Logan’s life is largely defined by the toll that emotional trauma takes on him. To begin with, his childhood is marred by the deaths of his twin brother and his father. Then he is forever tied, emotionally and legally, to his mother’s colossal mistake that led to the deaths of millions. He lives under the impression that his mother died by suicide; is cut off, permanently, from his wife and daughter; learns his mother is actually still alive and then loses her again; and then is forced to choose between his sister and all of humanity. The traumas pile up, ending with his discovery, in the Epilogue, that his wife and daughter have moved on without him.
Logan’s emotional misery is nearly constant throughout the novel. He is burdened with the heavy weight of guilt from his association with his mother’s mistake that led to the Great Starvation. He copes with this by compensating. Beth brings this to light when she questions why Logan is an agent of the GPA: “You do this out of obligation and guilt, and maybe that made sense in the beginning, but it’s been fifteen years since you were pardoned” (37). This compensation enables Logan to feel like he is righting a past wrong. After his upgrade, Logan learns how to compartmentalize his feelings and how to subdue his emotions. He comes to consider the recognition of emotional pain as a weakness. In a letter he writes to Beth, Logan says, “I am hardly recognizable as that man who said goodbye to you in our kitchen. I suspect you would think I’ve become aloof, withdrawn, and interior. Maybe even cold” (170). Here, Logan alludes to the subjugation of his emotions to his intellect.
It isn’t until the Epilogue that Logan resolves to allow himself to feel emotion again, even if those emotions are associated with pain. He comes to learn that he must accept the events of his life in a way that creates growth, and that growth is not just dependent on intellectual rationalization of life. In the final letter, which closes the Epilogue, Logan says, “[E]ven though I’m changed from the Logan you once knew, the part of me that loved you madly remains” (337). He goes on to suggest that he is learning to accept the simultaneous existence of beauty and pain. In his final words, Logan says, “What do you call a heart that is simultaneously full and breaking? Maybe there’s no word for it, but for some reason, it makes me think of rain falling through sunlight” (337). The melancholic note struck by these last words underscores Logan’s emotional growth in the novel as a character who evolves from embracing counterproductive coping mechanisms (such as overcompensation) to one who accepts suffering as an unavoidable aspect of life and chooses to value the beauty alongside it.
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By Blake Crouch
