"Life is made of these moments -- of one's physical being moving through time and space -- and we string them together into a story, and that story becomes our life."
Scott is an existentialist. He spends a lot of his time musing about what his existence means. After this plane crash he doesn't feel any great change in his life. The crash was just another moment in time which contributes to the great story of his life.
"Death was not an intellectual conceit. It was an existential black hole, an animal riddle, both problem and solution, and the grief it inspired could not be fixed or bypassed like a faulty relay, but only endured."
Death is a central theme of this story because it's fresh on everybody's minds after the plane crash. Scott refuses to live any differently after his near-death experience, but he sees the world around him trying to change because of it. JJ is struggling to process how radically different his childhood will be now. By watching his struggles, Scott realizes that death is not a construct that can be accepted or rejected. It is actually just an ending, a chasm about which nothing can be done after all.
“How to describe the things we see onscreen, experiences we have that are not ours? After so many hours (days, weeks, years) of watching TV—the morning talk shows, the daily soaps, the nightly news and then into prime time (The Bachelor, Game of Thrones, The Voice)—after a decade of studying the viral videos of late-night hosts and Funny or Die clips emailed by friends, how are we to tell the difference between them, if the experience of watching them is the same?"
Media plays a central role in this novel. America watches the investigation surrounding the plane crash unfold via television. As Scott wonders, though, how can people understand that it's real? Each television program is watched in the same way so that each becomes indistinguishable from the next. People are watching television, even when the shows are explaining real events. They aren't living through anything, just watching.
“But money, like gravity, is a force that clumps, drawing in more and more of itself, eventually creating the black hole that we know as wealth. This is not simply the fault of humans. Ask any dollar bill and it will tell you it prefers the company of hundreds to the company of ones. Better to be a sawbuck in a billionaire’s account than a dirty single in the torn pocket of an addict.”
Scott sees how money has influenced the events which transpired before, during, and after the crash. He understands that money follows rules of attraction. Those who have money will get more. Those who have none will never get any more. As a struggling artist, Scott interprets this to mean he will never succeed. His cynicism is fueled by a series of frustrating experiences and depression.
