Cline’s Ready Player One is a paradoxical text that layers upon itself.  It is an intricate game within an even larger game, a futuristic world obsessed with the past, and a utopia within a dystopia.  The latter, however, complicates itself near the novel’s end.

The OASIS is introduced as just that, an escape from an oppressive reality.  Yet, as the narrative moves foreword, the OASIS, treated with near reverence by the majority of characters, reveals itself to hide a fractured reality. Ogden Morrow declares, “the OASIS has evolved into something horrible” and “had become a self-imposed prison for humanity.” The perspective shifts on this once utopic space, as it slowly discloses its corrupting influence on humanity.  Still, the OASIS is neither wholly dystopia nor utopia.  Cline allows this virtual reality to exist on the liminal edge of both spaces.  It encourages education and knowledge.  It is a haven, perhaps even a crutch, for those with nothing else, a sole source of solace in an increasingly dying world.  Cline allows the OASIS to remain all of these things, while simultaneously almost drugging humanity into indifference of its decaying reality.

As Wade wins the Hunt, an image of Halliday appears, introducing us to “the Big Red Button” for the first time. “If you press it,” Halliday explains, “it will shut off the entire OASIS and launch a worm that will delete everything . . . It will shut does the OASIS forever.”  Never learning whether Wade pushed the button, the novel ends on a level ambiguity that mirrors that of the OASIS itself.