Playground: A Novel

Content Warning: This section refers to intimate partner violence.

As a young man, Rafi reads The Philosophy of the Common Task by Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov, which concerns the human potential to resurrect the dead. The suggestion appeals to Rafi because he carries guilt that he’s desperate to address: He blames himself for both his parents’ separation and his younger sister’s death (when she fell down a flight of stairs after arguing with their mother’s partner on Rafi’s behalf and fleeing the house). Intellectually, Rafi knows his guilt is irrational; emotionally, however, he can’t shake the burden. If he could somehow resurrect his sister, he could seek her forgiveness. Resurrecting the dead alludes to a potential to change the past, to repair the emotional fissures that seem irreparable. Rafi’s guilt weighs so heavily on him that he feels a need to succeed, as if his world-altering success might somehow be a fitting tribute to his lost sister.

Fyodorov frames the raising of the dead as a potential endpoint for human technological development. Technology, Fyodorov suggests, will one day advance enough to make the impossible possible. Striving toward the impossible isn’t only important on the individual level, offering salvation and catharsis to people like Rafi, but it also gives society an organizing principle.