Lauren’s hyperempathy is something that could be glossed over, potentially, as a means of establishing reader sympathy, and furthering Lauren’s strength and vulnerability as a protagonist. However, this “delusion” of hers begs further inquiry, in light of the seriousness of the novel’s other themes. Lauren is gifted with a level of foresight which allows her to see past risky immediate gains, which her brother pursues, and the backwards looking stoicism of the community elders. This capacity of hers seems fundamentally tied up in the pain she has had to endure through hyperempathy. The ability to intimately feel the suffering of others gives her a visceral sense of the overall decay of the community. Her concern for the fate of the community and even humanity as a whole, then, is not an affected or superficial one. She carries the pain of the neighborhood in a way that is beyond mere emotion, or intellectual concern – it is somatized, made physical and real. This lends heavily to the religious themes of the novel. Lauren becomes martyr-like, almost in the vein of a Christ figure, forced to suffer the outcomes of social degradation alone on behalf of the greater community.
In this regard, Keith is her greatest opposite thus far in the novel. He is a sociopath, totally numb to the violence and pain he inflicts in pursuit of short term gains and a sense of manhood, power, and status. At the same time, he represents the flawed logic of the wanderers outside, who exist merely to stake a bloody claim in a violently careless world, a position of total transience and futility. Regardless, Keith’s frustration with the stagnation of the neighborhood is warranted – it is a place of hopeless and delusional atavism, doomed to fail gradually in the same way that Keith is destroyed abruptly. Lauren’s religion stands in contrast to both Keith’s reckless desire for newness and her father’s old fashioned stoicism. It pushes for radical, progressive change, but in a way that is calculated, based on the formation of an essentially new idea of community.