Symbols Flashcards
Lucky Finger
Eli’s lucky finger represents his childhood
innocence and his coming-of-age process.
Eli also shares how later,
after Slim began babysitting him, Slim listened to the anecdote
and observed that the freckle and the finger represent “home.”
Those happy and secure feelings disappear, though, when Iwan
Krol cuts off Eli’s lucky finger on the night that he and Tytus
Broz drag away Lyle to murder him and Mum ends up going to
prison. Eli’s childhood effectively ends at this point:
For much of the novel, then,
Eli mourns the loss of his finger and of the innocence and
security the finger represented for him. It’s cathartic, then, to
discover his finger in Tytus’s underground bunker, and to use
the specimen jar holding the finger to hit Iwan over the head.
This represents Eli reclaiming his right to his own body
“he’d sit for hours, silently filling the street with water.”
P9
August remembers the moon pool incident, and attempts to contain the loss and suffering within himself, expressing trauma as a selective mutism. He stares at his reflection in the pools, not in a narcissus way, but out of curiosity, personal discovery and a longing for personal identity. Filling pools and controlling the way the moon is reflected gives August a sense of control that was previously stripped from him, where he controls the universe, taking it in, or, ‘swallowing’ the universe.
