CHARACTER
Holding up the Universeby Jennifer Niven

Moses Hunt

Moses Hunt

Quick Facts

  • Role: Secondary antagonist; childhood and present-day bully whose cruelty shapes Libby’s trauma
  • First appearance: Playground flashback in the “SIX YEARS EARLIER” sequence; later reappears as a threatening teen
  • Key relationships: Tormentor of Libby Strout; violent antagonist to Jack Masselin; member of the notorious Hunt family

Who He Is

Moses Hunt is less a fully rounded character than a force—the personified voice of ridicule that stalks Libby from childhood into adolescence. His presence bridges past and present: the boy who weaponized language on a playground becomes the teenager who weaponizes his body in a front yard. He refuses the moral work of recognizing others as whole people, making him the text’s clearest embodiment of judgment that refuses to see beyond the surface, a willful blindness that undercuts the novel’s exploration of Seeing Beyond Appearances.

Personality & Traits

Moses is static by design, a stagnant well of malice whose predictability is part of the threat—Libby and Jack can count on him to be cruel, and that reliability is chilling. His meanness is not mischievous or impulsive; it’s targeted, rehearsed, and honed to cut on contact.

  • Cruel, precision-focused: He tailors insults to Libby’s deepest fears—her body, her grief—so the words don’t just sting; they scar. Calling her “Flabby Stout” and blaming her for her mother’s death turns teasing into psychic assault.
  • Aggressive and violent: The verbal sadism of childhood escalates into physical brutality in the present; he jumps fights and assaults Jack unprovoked, showing a comfort with harm as performance.
  • Judgmental to the point of dehumanization: Moses insists Libby is nothing but her size, making him the novel’s baseline refusal of empathy and the thematic counterpoint to the work of seeing people as more than their bodies.
  • Hateful, not merely mean: Libby perceives “the hate in there like it’s lodged in his pupils,” signaling that his aggression is not social posturing but calcified contempt.
  • Rough, prematurely aged appearance: Jack notes he “looks forty,” with “missing teeth” and a face worn down by “hard living”—his exterior mirroring the corrosion within.

Character Journey

Moses doesn’t change—and that’s the point. The narrative freezes him at the same moral temperature from fifth grade to high school, so his lack of growth can illuminate Libby’s. While he remains the unbending voice of contempt, Libby learns to narrate her life without him at the center. His stasis highlights her movement toward self-definition and dignity, key to the novel’s exploration of Self-Acceptance and Body Image. For Libby, Moses becomes the test case of whether another person’s view can dictate her reality; for readers, he clarifies that some external forces won’t soften or mature, which makes the internal work of re-seeing oneself even more urgent. He also functions as the social mechanism that pushes Libby toward Loneliness and Isolation, crowding her out of public spaces until she fights her way back.

Key Relationships

  • Libby Strout: Moses is the voice in Libby’s head long before he’s the threat in her hallway. His playground tirade weaponizes shame at the exact moment Libby is vulnerable, turning public space into a site of danger and catalyzing her withdrawal from school. Years later, the same script of contempt resurfaces, and Libby’s task becomes refusing to let his words author her story.

  • Jack Masselin: With Jack, Moses shifts from verbal cruelty to bodily harm. He and his brother corner Jack in the bathroom, then later beat him after the party, turning Jack’s admission of prosopagnosia into an opportunity for punishment. Their encounter shows how a culture of mockery metastasizes into violence when a crowd is watching.

  • The Hunt Brothers: Moses’s menace is reinforced by his family’s reputation—“as notorious as the James Gang.” The Hunts operate like a local myth of intimidation, suggesting that for Moses, cruelty isn’t an aberration but a learned mode of belonging.

Defining Moments

Moses’s scenes are brief but surgical, each one widening the radius of his harm and clarifying his symbolic function in the novel.

  • The Playground Confrontation (SIX YEARS EARLIER) (Chapter 61-65 Summary)

    • What happens: Moses targets young Libby with a barrage of insults—“Flabby Stout,” “No one will ever love you,” “You probably killed your mom.”
    • Why it matters: This is the origin point of Libby’s anxiety and self-doubt, establishing the voice she must later unlearn and the social exile that follows.

  • The Post-Party Assault (Chapter 111-115 Summary)

    • What happens: After Jack publicly reveals his prosopagnosia, Moses and Malcolm beat him in the yard.
    • Why it matters: The scene proves that Moses’s cruelty didn’t stay in the past and didn’t stay verbal. His violence literalizes the cost of being visibly vulnerable in a hostile crowd.

Essential Quotes

No one will ever love you. Because you’re fat.

This is Moses at his most strategic: he attacks the future, not just the present. By framing love as a resource Libby can never access, he tries to fix her identity in scarcity and make shame feel permanent.

Go home, Flabby Stout. The sun can’t shine when you come out … You’re so big you block the moon. Go home, Flabby, go to your room …

The sing-song cadence turns cruelty into a chant—easy to remember, hard to forget. By invoking cosmic images (sun, moon), he inflates his mockery to mythic scale, making the humiliation feel universal rather than momentary.

You probably killed your mom by sitting on her.

This line shows Moses crossing from insult to desecration, exploiting grief to deepen humiliation. It explains why Libby experiences his behavior as hatred, not teasing: he targets what should be beyond ridicule and makes it a weapon.