Noise

Ah yes, Noise—in a way, we really couldn't have the book without it. It's not really a means to an end, per say, or a wrench in the overall plot, but it gives the book its mood and majorly contributes to its vibe. What's one word that we could use to describe the world of Todd Hewitt in The Knife of Never Letting Go? Chaos. And that's largely thanks to the Noise.

Todd tells us that "The Noise is a man unfiltered, and without a filter, a man is just chaos walking" (4.34). Think about the inner-workings of your own head—it's a hot mess, right? Ours are anyway as the good, the bad, the ugly, and (of course) the brilliant all swirl together. In the world we live in, though, we get to reign this all in, choosing what to show the people around us and keeping the rest where it belongs: under lockdown inside our brains. But in Todd's world, Noise makes that impossible, it lets it all hang out. And the result is chaos.

Noise mimics the chaotic side of human nature. Todd says that "men's minds are messy places and Noise is like the active, breathing face of that mess" (4.33). More than the constant stream of sound, though, perhaps most unsettling thing about Noise is this: You'd think that a world where everything was out in the open would be a pretty honest place, right? Wrong. Big time.

Noise is full of "pictures of memories and fantasies and secrets and plans and lies, lies lies. Cuz you can […] bury stuff under other stuff, you can hide it in plain sight" (2.21). Instead of making the truth plain and clear, then, Noise shows that people are so despicable that they lie in their own minds. To themselves, just like they do to everyone else. So reading someone's Noise doesn't even guarantee that you know what's actually going on in their life. As Todd explains:

It usually adds up to one big mash of sound and thought and picture and half the time it's impossible to make any sense of it at all. (4.33)

Noise also really plays up the whole totalitarianism thing that the story has going. With everyone's thoughts out in the open, nothing can be hidden, privacy becomes pretty much obsolete—Noise represents a loss of control. As Cillian tells Todd, "Keep yer thoughts quiet. That's more important than you know" (4.83). To this end, when you're living with Noise, your best bet is ignorance. After all, what you don't know can't hurt you.

Okay yes, there's still the elephant in the room that needs to be addressed: Why do men get it and the women don't? No scientific answer is given, and instead it's just the way it is with Noise. But it might actually be the real reason that they all went crazy: "They couldn't stand the silence. They couldn't stand women knowing everything about them and them knowing nothing about women" (36.70). Noise also represents the madness men came to in response to not being able to figure women out, their violent discomfort in the face of feminine mystery.

Of course, we all know the horrible thing that this led to: the men of Prentisstown murdering all the women. Although Todd doesn't actually get the idea to kill Viola, trying to communicate with a "quiet" person is really difficult if you have Noise. When he's first getting used to her, he asks, "how can you know for sure when a person's got no Noise? How can they be a person if they ain't got no Noise?" (7.42). It completely baffles him—he's not even sure how someone can be human without Noise, even though Noise is a germ.