Every Day Essay Questions

During A's 24-hour stays, A is typically very careful to cause as little disruption as possible to the hosts' lives. This changes, however, with the introduction of Rhiannon into A's life. In what ways does A's relationship with Rhiannon affect the way A treats hosts?

Before meeting Rhiannon, A consistently put the needs of the hosts above personal desires, attempting to leave the hosts' lives entirely unaltered and protected during each 24-hour stay. As A's relationship with Rhiannon progresses, however, A begins to adhere less and less closely to this rule, disregarding the plans, responsibilities, and commitments of the hosts in order to prioritize seeing Rhiannon. When A hears of a party in Rhiannon's town, A immediately ditches Nathan Daldry's life to drive there, stranding him an hour away from home in the process. When A wakes up in the body of a host whose family plans to travel to Hawaii that morning, A runs away from the host's home and family with no explanation, worrying the host's family and landing the host in serious trouble. The pattern continues with several other hosts. When A has a chance to visit Rhiannon, A ditches the hosts' days at school. When A gets into a rough patch with Rhiannon, A calls in sick and sleeps through the day. As the tensions heighten in A's relationship with Rhiannon, this disregard for the hosts becomes more and more pronounced. A, however, never completely loses the sense of responsibility that they had previously relied upon, and this tension between A's personal desires and the safety of the hosts becomes one of the most important trials A faces in the novel.

Levithan references William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet a few times in the novel. Are A and Rhiannon similar to the famously tragic, star-crossed couple? In what ways?

Like Romeo and Juliet, A and Rhiannon are teenagers who quickly form a deep emotional attachment, though their disparate circumstances make their relationship difficult. Although A and Rhiannon do not come from feuding families, they do come from vastly different backgrounds, which complicates their relationship just as the feud between the Montagues and the Capulets complicates the relationship between Romeo and Juliet. A is a disembodied spirit, and Rhiannon is a normal teenage girl, which effectively makes A and Rhiannon as star-crossed as Romeo and Juliet. At the beginning of Romeo and Juliet, the titular characters share an enchanting first encounter that sets off the play's tragic sequence of events. Similarly, at the beginning of Every Day, A and Rhiannon share a special day at the beach that sets off the novel's plot and changes the course of A's life forever. Ultimately, A and Rhiannon are indeed similar to Romeo and Juliet, as both couples face insurmountable obstacles to their love, but Levithan presents a more hopeful outcome with the ending of Every Day. Although A and Rhiannon cannot have a successful relationship, A's decision to let Rhiannon go is a healthy example of putting a loved one's needs before one's own.

After encountering homophobic protesters, A declares that "people use the devil as an alias for the things they fear." What does A mean by this?

Throughout Every Day, David Levithan reveals the ways in which closed-minded people display hatred and nastiness toward the things they fear. In this quote, A asserts that the homophobic protesters' negative treatment of gay people stems from their deep-rooted, unfounded fears of the LGBTQ community. Rather than attempting to understand people whose experiences are different from theirs, these protesters vilify and condemn them, simply because it is easier to do this than to do the hard work of fostering empathy. Levithan returns to this theme throughout the novel, with another example being Nathan's crusade against A. Just like these protesters, Nathan casts A as evil, masking his deep fears with condemnation instead of truly attempting to get to know A better. With these situations, Levithan offers a critique of jumping to conclusions based on fear, especially when doing so endangers the safety and happiness of innocent people.

At the library, A and Rhiannon bond over their mutual dislike of The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein, and A declares that "love means never having to lose your limbs." What does A mean by this? Can any comparison be made between A and Rhiannon's relationship and the relationship in The Giving Tree?

Both A and Rhiannon dislike The Giving Tree due to its portrayal of an unhealthily lopsided relationship. The tree unrelentingly sacrifices for the boy, letting him take her apples, branches, and eventually its whole trunk. With the statement "love means never having to lose your limbs," A criticizes Silverstein's portrayal of self-sacrificing love, instead asserting that true love means remaining healthy and whole. Consequently, when it becomes clear that a relationship with Rhiannon would require unhealthy sacrifices on both of their parts, just like the relationship in The Giving Tree, A makes the difficult decision to let Rhiannon go. Instead of allowing the relationship to progress, resulting in the inevitable loss of their limbs, just as the tree loses its branches, A decides to set Rhiannon up with the last host in the novel, Alexander, in the hopes that she can find a healthy, balanced relationship with him. This decision harkens back to A and Rhiannon's discussion of The Giving Tree earlier in the novel, and it portrays the moral fortitude and growth A has developed over the course of Every Day.

Each chapter of Every Day begins with A waking up in the body of a new host, and Levithan titles each of the chapters by the number of days A has existed (Day 6001, Day 6002). What effect does Every Day's structure have on the novel?

The structure of Every Day mimics A's experience as a disembodied spirit. Just as A begins each day by waking up in a new body, the reader begins each new chapter with an introduction to a new host. Because each chapter follows one day of A's life, and A spends each day in a new host's body, the chapters each take on a separate, stand-alone quality, almost akin to short stories. This mimics A's experience, as each new day is vastly different from the last. As a whole, this structure works to immerse the reader in A's story as it facilitates understanding of A's unique experience.