The Business Trip

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death.

The novel suggests that Jasmine’s violence is related to income inequality in the US. When she meets Stephanie on the plane to Denver, Jasmine’s first thought is “of the unfairness of life” (204). She questions why Stephanie is able “to jet around the country in lovely clothes when it took [her] over a year to save up enough for just this one flight” (204). Although Stephanie and Jasmine are both flying in economy, and Stephanie’s trip is paid for by her work, Jasmine assumes that Stephanie belongs to a different economic class.

Jasmine keenly feels the disparity between herself and Stephanie when she watches Stephanie check in to a luxurious hotel while she checks into a cheap motel. Jasmine compares the pen and paper at her motel to the ones at Stephanie’s hotel: At Stephanie’s hotel, “the pen [i]s heavy, the paper thick. It fe[els] important when you [a]re writing” (283). At Jasmine’s motel, on the other hand, the pen “[i]s a Bic ballpoint that look[s] as if someone had chewed the end of it,” and “the paper [i]s of a thin, almost scratchy quality” (283). Jasmine interprets the difference as “just another way the class system in America reward[s] people like Stephanie, Trent, Allison, and Drake and care[s] little about people like [her]” (283).