Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory
Setting
The world of 2045 is a bleak place: people are overcrowded and unemployed, and all places everywhere seems to suffering from an energy shortage. There's not even real food available anymore, as we...
Narrator Point of View
From the prologue of Ready Player One, we learn that the narrator, Wade Watts, is looking back on the events of the book from some point in the future, although we're not sure how far ahead. He say...
Genre
If you own a copy of Ready Player One, you might peek at the back of the book and see that it's classified as science fiction. That's not entirely true. About 5% of the book takes place in the futu...
What's Up With the Title?
The title of the book is also the first thing a person sees upon logging into OASIS. James Halliday, the creator of the OASIS, was inspired by the video games of his youth, which greeted the player...
What's Up With the Epigraph?
The novel has three epigraphs, one in each of the three sections the book is divided into. The epigraph from Level One and Level Three are fictional quotes from Anorak's Almanac, Halliday's guide t...
What's Up With the Ending?
The hero wins the game, defeats the big bad corporation, inherits bajillions of dollars, gets the girl, and learns a life lesson: you can't live your life in virtual reality. Could it get more perf...
Tough-o-Meter
Video games have different difficulty levels: easy, normal, hard, expert, and so on. Books aren't much different in that respect. Some of them require lots of backtracking just to figure out what's...