Summary
In The Measure's Prologue, we enter a world in which everyone over the age of 22 has received a mysterious wooden box engraved with the words "The measure of your life lies within." This includes everyone from a young couple in New York to a mother in India. At first, there is complete confusion: no one knows where these boxes have come from and everyone is looking for an explanation. There are conspiracy theories as to whether this is the work of a hacker organization, aliens, or a secret government. The more cautious people put the box away or put off opening it until more information on the boxes is available, while others open them immediately. Within each box lies a red string that foretells the length of the recipient's life. This chapter begins with the initial response to the boxes' arrival and how the truth about the boxes affects the lives of the main characters Nina, Maura, Ben, Amie, and Hank.
"Spring" opens with Nina, who is the first character we see discover the box. Nina is a journalist living in a New York City apartment with her girlfriend of 2 years, Maura. Maura is more daring than Nina, so she instinctually wants to open the box. However, Nina convinces her to wait for more information on the boxes to come out. Nina is initially extremely skeptical and believes there must be a scientific or rational explanation for the appearance of the boxes, and is the most adamant skeptic in her workplace. Her curiosity is no match for her cautious nature, and her priority is not getting freaked out unnecessarily and instead waiting to figure out a course of action at the appropriate time. Maura eventually wins out and the pair open their boxes one week before the truth of the strings comes out. Maura's string is about half the length of Nina's string. Once Nina learns from a fellow journalist who has a source at the Department of Health and Human Services that the strings are real, Nina freezes. Nina knows she has to tell Maura, even though she's dealing with the fact that the life of the woman she loves will be cut short. As Maura has only 10 years left to live, she faces the reality that her life is ending much earlier than she anticipated. The discourse around the strings, including from the pope, is that the strings are a gift from God. For Maura, her string doesn't feel like a gift at all. At this point, Nina convinces Maura to begin going to a group for short-stringers at Nina's sister Amie's school.
Next we meet Ben, a young architect who's 36,000 feet in the air when his box arrives at his home. As soon as he lands in New York City, he enters a seemingly different world. He's confronted with ominous energy around him as he commutes through the airport and Grand Central Station, oblivious to the fate awaiting him when he returns home. Ben learns he has a short string. Ben's friend from college is one of the few people he tells about his string. This friend, a long-stringer, convinces him to try a support group for short-stringers. Walking through the halls of the Connelly Academy in the Upper East Side, where the meetings are held, reminds him of when he accompanied his parents, both teachers, to work as a child. It also reminds him of the tough times he endured in school. Ben is the first to arrive at the support group, followed shortly by Maura, after hours in Amie's classroom. One day in the support group, Sean, the group's facilitator, gives the group an assignment to write a letter to themselves or someone they'd like to say something to. Ben writes a letter with a sketch of the Manhattan skyline on its outer layer and accidentally drops it in the classroom. In the next group session, Maura points out his letter on the floor, and he finds a response signed "-A" inside his letter.
Initially, we meet Amie indirectly through other characters in the story. Her classroom, room 204, is the site of the short-stringer support group. We first encounter Amie's point-of-view when she finds Atonement under her bed, realizing she's never finished it as she lost it in the move. Because of Amie's love of literature, she recognizes a storyline plot unfolding in her own life: characters in novels often make rash decisions when they don't understand the chaos around them, only to suffer the consequences later. She decides not to open her box and instead becomes the observer, watching her childhood fantasy of being wrapped up in a fantastical adventure come to life.
Amie teaches fifth graders at the Connelly Academy, and it is within her classroom, with her arms filled with copies of Tuck Everlasting for her class's summer reading assignment, that the school's custodian presents her with a folded piece of looseleaf that he found the night before. Amie's storyline takes on the twist she's been hoping for when she opens the looseleaf and finds a letter with descriptions of people that she doesn't know. She's unsure what to think of the letter but realizes that it must be part of a therapy practice in the short-stringer support group. Amie thinks about the woman that the letter writer describes, named Gertrude. The letter writer saw Gertrude's letter in a WWII museum, and Amie notices the parallels between the letter and Atonement. In an instance of dramatic irony, readers know the letter is from Ben because of the Manhattan skyline drawn on it, and we also know that Amie writes back to Ben, beginning an exchange of letters between two strangers via the floor of room 204.
The last character we meet in this section is Hank, an ER doctor at New York Memorial Hospital. Through Hank's eyes, we see the hospital's changing relationship with short-stringers. First, at the beginning of the arrival of the strings, short-stringers were invited to the hospital for tests in hopes of explaining their strings. However, as people learn the truth about the strings, the hospital board decides to bar indulging short-stringers with no symptoms. Hank sees a frantic man named Jonathan Clarke enter the hospital holding his box and asking for help. He has no symptoms and is sent home after causing a scene. At the end of his shift, Hank resigns due to his feeling of growing impotence. There's a shooting at New York Memorial Hospital, and we can conjecture that Jonathan Clarke is the gunman responsible.
Following the shooting at New York Memorial Hospital, Nina and her fellow journalists discuss the angle of the news article on the shooting. This discussion exemplifies this new world, as they describe it as the first mass shooting of "the new world order" (p. 65). The questions posed in the discussion are whether short-stringers have become a threat, how many deaths constitute a tragedy, what is a mass shooting, and whether the hospital could be responsible for not having predicted that something could happen in a waiting room full of people who are, quite literally, at the end of their strings. We learn that gun lobbyists are washing their hands of any responsibility by using the argument that this is the fault of a short-stringer. Nina learns about the discrimination short-stringers are facing when she finds a website called String Theory, where people share short-stringer experiences such as their insurance premiums increasing suddenly, loan application denials, the correlation between being a person of color and having a shorter string, and being laid off due to long-term fiscal planning. All of this digging solidifies for Nina that it doesn't matter where the strings came from because people are the ones who decide what to do with them.
Analysis
In the opening of The Measure, we immediately enter a world that is about to change forever. Nikki Erlick signals this change by dividing time into the world before, the new world, and the new world order. The boxes' arrival is understood as giving the public access to information to which previously only God had been privy. The idea of seeing things from God's perspective is an idea that appears throughout the book. For example, Ben goes through Grand Central Station and focuses on the star painting above him that is supposed to illustrate the stars from God's perspective. Ben uses this imagery as a metaphor for how the world is now, with humans seeing things from God's perspective upon the arrival of the strings (p. 10-11). Similarly, in the pope's address on the strings, he speaks about faith and believing in what was once unbelievable. The pope draws a historical allusion to the apostles, suggesting that in the past humans also had access to knowledge usually reserved for God (30).
At the beginning of the book, Erlick foreshadows how the boxes can affect those who open them through the description of the boxes' presentation. Erlick anthropomorphizes the boxes by describing the delicate piece of fabric atop the string as appearing to protect us from our childish impulses. She also uses similes to anthropomorphize the boxe, describing them as asking the receiver to pause and contemplate their next move, as what they do can never be undone (p. 2). This anthropomorphization foreshadows the regret of the curious child, which is a throughline in the book—as soon as characters with short strings open their box, their first feeling is often regret. We see different characters' descriptions of this regret: Nina describes what short-stringers are experiencing as the "ordinary, everyday anguish"(p. 38) that lay underneath their violent actions. Hank describes witnessing people getting stuck and left behind in stages of grief that they can't transition out of (p. 50).
The grief affecting short-stringers raises the theme of perspective through the characters' questioning whether or not the boxes are a gift. In the pope's address about the strings, he describes them as a gift (30). We see the juxtaposition between characters as we move through individual points of view of how the characters see their strings. We know Maura doesn't see the strings as a gift (p. 30), and much of Nina's storyline is trying to find answers while being tormented by grief for the impending death of the woman she loves while she herself has decades of life ahead of her. It begs the question: if the strings can be a source of anguish for people who have received supposedly "good" results, how can they be a gift? From Amie's perspective, we see that even though Nina is consumed with grief about Maura's short string, she is relieved to know that she has a long life ahead of her (p. 55-56). Amie's long-stringer friends describe experiencing an "unprecedented peace of mind" from knowing they have a long life ahead of them (p. 55). Amie, who has decided not to open her box, is in the relatively objective position of the observer. She finds the arrival of the strings to be a manifestation of the real-life adventure she's wanted to experience since childhood (p. 63). These juxtapositions of short-stringers' and long-stringers' experiences of receiving their strings demonstrate how whether or not something is a gift depends on perspective and who you ask.
Erlick sets the tone of The Measure through her writing of everyday situations and repetition. Erlick illustrates the break in the historical timeline through the repetition of terms such as "the world before" and "the new world order." Ben even believes that he may have felt a shift in the plane when things changed on Earth, in an as-above-so-below way (p. 11). There is an ominous element to everyday situations, created by the tension of having the most intimate information one could have—the length of one's life—become the center of everyday interactions. We see this tension in the empty rush-hour subways in New York and a delirious man on the subway singing the song "Little Boxes" (p. 9-10). This situation is an allegory: while on the surface it seems that he's just mentally unwell, he's singing a song that illustrates the irony of the situation. Everyone has received these small boxes, all visually the same. However, their mere presence is causing their present circumstance—an ominously empty train car due to the presence of these "little boxes."
We also see situational irony portrayed in the date between two characters in the story. During this date the female character is adamant that the strings cannot be real, and that it's crazy to think that they are. Then we learn that she not only looked at her string, but she's a long-stringer. This situation is also poignant because instead of speaking about common date topics such as political persuasions or whether or not they want kids, they're arguing about the validity of strings as a whole. More broadly, there is an ever-present element of situational irony in The Measure. Death is the only thing guaranteed for human beings. However, it's most people's greatest fear—and most of this fear stems from uncertainty. In The Measure, everyone has the option to be privy to this very knowledge, yet it's causing so much upheaval. Through Nina's lens, we see that part of the issue stems from the fact that people are unable to exert control over the situation (p. 39).
