Liberation Day: Stories

Content Warning: The source text and this study guide discuss oppression, mental and physical control, wartime violence, addiction, suicide, and sexual abuse.

Oppression through physical or mental control (or both) is a key theme in almost all of the stories in Liberation Day. In “Liberation Day,” for instance, Speakers and Singers are enslaved by a ruling class who pin them to walls and control when, and how, they can communicate. In “Ghoul,” a society has been sent underground and forced to comply with performative, theatrical rituals in the vain hope that, one day, visitors might come from the world above. In several stories, including “Liberation Day” and “Elliot Spencer,” humans are oppressed through brainwashing strategies on the part of more powerful entities. The various forms of oppression throughout Saunders’s collection allow Saunders to convey the dangers of unchecked authority, the decline of personal agency, and the insidious ways in which power and domination can creep into the daily lives of humans.

In several stories, oppression and control is a highly complex, and therefore dangerous, tool that serves various social groups. In “Liberation Day,” for instance, Jeremy sides with his oppressors due to his love for Mrs. U., thereby abandoning the other Speakers who are subsequently punished and brainwashed. In a moment that illuminates the extent of his oppression and brainwashing, Jeremy hands his weapon over to the people who are, in reality, his greatest danger: “…I see: desire, acceptance, a warm assurance that if I hand her the gun, she will do what is right” (56). The irony is, of course, that Mrs. U is a member of the ruling class which enslaves Jeremy and the other Speakers under subhuman conditions. The power of the oppressors’ control over Jeremy’s thoughts and emotions, however, causes him to, likewise, become an extension of that oppression as he turns against his own peers and against his own self-interest. This decision contributes to the story’s investigation into how oppression and control can be enacted by a ruling group but can also simultaneously be perpetuated by members of the oppressed group itself, due to mental, emotional, and physical control and manipulation. A similar sequence arises in “Ghouls,” which is set in a society that depends upon peer-to-peer surveillance for the maintenance of order. The Monitors, who are the voices of authority and law in this society, perpetuate a competitive “First Individual Forthcoming” system that encourages citizens to tell the authorities if a colleague is spreading “Regrettable Falsehoods” (147-148). This system depends upon citizens’ fear of brutal punishment and their willingness to endanger others to protect themselves; it illustrates, like the system in “Liberation Day,” how oppressive systems can spread control and manipulation not only from the ruling class downward but also through insidious channels among society itself.

Throughout several of the stories in this collection, Saunders treats oppression as a function of loss of autonomy. His dystopian social settings see groups of citizens lose their ability to speak freely, voice their opinions, express dissent, and even to recall their own individual livelihoods prior to oppressive control. Although Saunders presents stories that are hyperbolic and satirical, the crux of his concerns are rooted in tangible contexts, which he demonstrates through such allegories as the process of Westward expansion in the 19th century, which oppressed and erased Indigenous tribes. By combining historical allegory with imagined, fictional futures, Saunders explores the nuances of oppression in many forms and through many avenues, several of which are subtle, insidious, and difficult to eradicate.