The Celebrants

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussions of drug overdose.

Drug use functions as a motif throughout The Celebrants, in both a sinister and casual manner. Based on the college origins of the friends’ relationship, they revisit drug use on occasion. Steven Rowley presents instances of the friends partaking in drugs as a casual activity between college friends. They smoke marijuana—which Naomi has stashed in Sur la Vie—during Marielle’s funeral and trip on mushrooms on the boat ride around New York City during Craig’s. These instances produce humorous as well as genuine conversations. Some instances and references to drug use are comedic. For example, Marielle meditates on the idea of psilocybin in mushrooms as a defense mechanism in the wild, and “[s]he imagined fawns and squirrels and foxes prancing about and communing while high as kites” (244). Like humor, Rowley also uses drug use to catalyze the group’s interactions in more serious circumstances: Marielle and Jordy reconcile after their argument while tripping on mushrooms, and the group contacts Alec via the Ouija board after smoking marijuana. The motif therefore relates to The Role of Dark Humor in Coping with Mortality.

References to drug use are both portrayed as casual and symptomatic of a cavalier disregard for life, given the way Alec died.