They: a pronoun that illustrates a crowd in and of itself. Remove the t and the y and you are left with he. Or, remove the e and you are left with thy (a little archaic, but still representative of your). Perspectives of his, yours, and theirs are evident. What’s missing? I. Mine. A personalized sense of ownership. My point? Karen’s first and final scenes in this novel are paralleled with the involvement of they. We see her initial scenes of the novel reflecting the linking of individuality with collectivity/fragmentation with unity,“They all feel the same, young people from fifty countries, immunized against the language of self. The stand and chant, fortified by the blood of numbers,” (8). Karen’s final scene in the novel vocalizes a different sentiment,“They can own the house,” Karen said. “But they should let us live here. And we keep the manuscript and we keep the pictures,” (223). She finally acknowledges a desire for individual ownership. While she does include Scott in her use of the first person plural, she finally expresses a language of possession. While we were technically only supposed to interpret the final scene of the novel, I think Karen’s final scene has to be interpreted in relation to her first scene. As Rabinowitz indicates in “Before Reading,”
“…the first and last sentences of most texts are privileged; that is, any interpretation of a text that cannot account for those sentences is generally deemed more defective than a reading that cannot account for some random sentence in the middle” (44).
Karen’s purpose in the beginning of the novel is to present the individual of the self through the context of the community. However, the end of the novel serves to show how the benefits of the community progress the individual self. Within a literal standpoint, her final scene in the novel serves as a catalyst to Bill’s legacy and her (and Scott’s) involvement in it. Although this conversation with Scott is at the end of the novel, it proves that her involvement in the novel and in Bill’s life has a continuity over time and space. In Chapter 12 of the novel, Karen’s voyeurism of the Chinese crowd provokes her to begin looking for Bill, “She followed a man who looked like Bill but he turned out on further inspection to not be a writer type at all” (178). Through this, Karen’s involvement in the novel also introduces the issue of surveillance or crowd control that is common in within large groups of people. Even though Bill is no longer with them, Karen and Scott can still maintain Bill’s reclusion from being a public figure. This fight for reclusion within seclusion becomes cyclical with her urgency to exclude Brita from their threesome at the start of the novel. In a more evocative sense, Karen’s final scene in the novel blends the collectiveness of a crowd with the independence of an individual. The scene implies that a crowd cannot be successful without its individuals. Her desire to keep Bill’s manuscript and pictures is also interesting, as Mark Osteen’s “Becoming Incorporated: Spectacular Authorship and DeLillo’s Mao II” highlights that,
“Even Karen, who thinks of marriage as a “channel to salvation” as if she were watching it on TV (10), unconsciously registers how Moon manipulates the discourse of images by diverting his children’s addiction to consumerism into his own capitalist religion.”
Similar to Reverend Moon’s “manipulation” of photographs for his own capitalist gain, Karen’s wish for Bill’s items almost illustrates how a crowd is born. She needs Bill’s house, Bill’s manuscript and photographs, and Scott’s help to maintain Bill’s isolation. Crowds become a dependence on space, manipulation, and individuals. Thus, a crowd is not just an issue of “they”, but a combination of individual elements as Karen’s involvement in the novel suggests.