Content Warning: This section refers to addiction.

“Quitters, Inc.” is a story about recovery from addiction that notably eschews any sense of optimism or triumph. For Morrison and the people like him who need Quitters, Inc. to kick their habits, recovery isn’t about stepping into a new world of self-actualization but moving from one mode of Learned Helplessness to another. Thematically, the story’s interest isn’t in the conquest of addiction so much as in drawing parallels between the pain of addiction and the harm caused by recovery itself. Whatever apparent happy ending at which the story might arrive, that end is only earned through collective suffering. For Quitters, Inc., freedom from addiction is achieved through the scattershot application of dehumanizing and disempowering psychological and physical abuse. When a person with an addiction decides to get better, everyone around them suffers.

This isn’t to say that addiction is preferable, but in the world of “Quitters, Inc.,” the messy cost of addictive behavior is as much a part of shedding an addiction as living with it. After all, it’s not as though everything is fine at the story’s inciting incident. Through the third-person limited perspective, the reader is given a front-row seat to Morrison’s internal world, an obsessive and largely unhappy place.