Themes In The Living By Matt De La Pena

In The Living, a young adult novel by Matt de la Pena, the reader follows the main character, a teenage boy named Shy, as his quest to work over the summer for extra cash becomes a life threatening journey he never could have expected. In this novel three themes are very present in the forms of Romero disease, stereotyping, and the past versus present experiences. All of these topics arrive in very different ways, but can be traced back to not only Shy’s life experience, but Matt de la Pena’s as well.
Though it is not always the main focus of the storyline, Romero disease plays a huge part in shaping the action. In the beginning the illness is introduced as a deadly infection that seemed to appear spontaneously and left its victims so dehydrated

Addison assumes Shy to be an uneducated, uncultured Mexican-American boy while he presumes her to be a snobbish, rich white girl who gets whatever she desires just from being born into privilege. In this example they actually happen to prove each other wrong. Shy uses his resourcefulness and empathy to help the pair survive on a broken life boat with meager fishing supplies and only enough water to manage for a few days. Addison shows herself to be resilient and even when she does break down, she always picks herself back up and powers forward. Though this was an example of judgement going wrong for the better, there is another instance where it goes correct for the worse. When Shy discovers he is being stalked by a man in a black suit, his instincts immediately tell him to avoid possible danger which he tends to follow in all but two situations. In the first, he pulls the injured man from a wrecked section on the ship with the help of another crewmate and get the suspicious man to the safety of the lifeboats. In the second, thinking he can trust him a bit more after the rescue, Shy follows him to a secluded cave where the plots about Romero and his employer’s hand in it are revealed. Unfortunately, this almost leaves Shy dead when a gun is pulled out only for him to be saved by a mysterious character known as Shoeshine. This