Noggin

Kasun Noggin is a 2014 young adult science fiction novel by John Corey Whaley. Borrowing many tropes from the classic work Frankenstein, it centers on the sudden reanimation of a dead teenager, postulating what the experience of a twentieth-first-century Frankenstein might be like. When he is cryogenically frozen in Denver, Colorado, Travis is decapitated and stuffed in a freezer for five years. Then, his head is discovered and attached to someone else’s body. Though time has passed in the physical world, Travis, still seeing the world as if he were sixteen, has to grapple with a world that has, in many ways, left him behind. Rather than fixate on the moral, scientific, or philosophical questions about human reanimation, the novel primarily considers what it might feel like to reintegrate into a world that has moved on in one’s absence.

The story begins by contextualizing Travis’s condition. Five years ago, he was on his deathbed, suffering from an untreatable form of cancer of the lymph nodes. He volunteered to participate in a medical experiment that was to remove his head, which was cancer-free, from the rest of his body, and freeze it until a new suitable body became available and advancements in medical technology enabled its reattachment. Five years later, a great candidate comes along: the body of Jeremy Pratt, a victim of aggressive brain cancer.

In the first scene, Travis wakes up from his head reattachment surgery. The novel proceeds day by day as he reintegrates into his life. The first thing he notices is that the technology people use in everyday life has already changed drastically. Also, his parents have erased all evidence of him from his house, including his bedroom, which looks as though anyone could have lived there. Travis’s friends have also grown up to become college-aged individuals, and they now live different lives all around the country. All of this change is extremely eerie to Travis, who feels as though he has just taken a short nap. In his mind, nothing is different than a few hours before, so he has to grapple with the fact that his body, friends, and family are suddenly not the same.



The biggest obstacle for Travis is making friends with an entirely new set of people and letting go of the old ones. He meets a clever, quirky friend named Hatton, while his old girlfriend, Cate, has already become engaged. His former best friend, Kyle, who had told Travis that he was gay as he lay dying, has now grown up and started dating girls. Travis, remembering his secret, believes that Kyle is still repressing his sexuality. He resolves to put effort into helping Kyle live a fuller life. Kyle resists initially, but soon has a breakdown and tells his girlfriend and family the truth about himself.

Inspired by convincing Kyle to come out to his peers and family, Travis redoubles his attempt to convince Cate that they can still have a chance together. He finds it difficult to shake the assumption that they can pick up where they left off. However, Cate tells him she is committed to her current partner, though she admits she still cares about Travis. When Travis refuses to back off, Cate grows angry and no longer reciprocates or invites signs of affection. Travis asks for her forgiveness for his mentality, explaining that to him, no time has passed, and he hasn’t had any time to grow out of his past feelings.

Travis’ understanding of a stable reality is undermined one final time by the realization that his parents have been divorced for years, and have stayed together merely in hopes that he would be someday revived. Instead of moving apart, they grieved together, holding onto a seemingly impossible dream. His parents’ struggle indicates that it is not only Travis who is stuck in the past. Travis and his parents reconcile with each other, and they begin to make headway into a future full of possibility.



As the novel concludes, Travis goes to the grave of Jeremy Pratt, the boy with terminal brain cancer who provided him with his body. He empties the ashes of his own former body into the grave, performing a symbolic substitution that releases the emotional ties of a past he now knows he cannot reclaim. Noggin thus ends as Travis completes a full transformation between two ontological modes: one which fixates on the past, unable to let go of stale ties; and one which conceives of each new moment as an opportunity for experience and change.