Symbols Flashcards
Ruth’s pencil case ✏️
✏️ Symbolises Ruth’s deceitful personality (human qualities)
✏️Shows Ruth’s need for a motherly relationship (why she tells Kathy it was a present from Miss Geraldine.
The stranded boat 🚤
🚤 Boats are a Jungian symbol for freedom, the fact that the boat is stranded symbolises how the clones have no freedom.
🚤 The crumbling boat is a symbol of mortality, highlighting the passage of time and the inevitability of loss that comes with it.
🚤 Kathy’s visit to the boat with Ruth and Tommy echoes their first trip to Norfolk, but with noticeable differences. Both Chrissie and Rodney are absent, Chrissie has already completed.
🚤Ruth and Tommy are both donors at this point, and Ruth exhibits signs of physical weakness.
🚤Although their visit is tinged a sense of loss, the students also find the boat beautiful. In this way, the boat echoes their memories of Hailsham that they cannot revisit.
🚤The ghostly boat in the marsh is as close to recovering this past as they can come
The woods around Hailsham and fences 🌳
🌳It is a symbol of the clone’s fear of the out side world
🌳The fact that the clones believe the stories around the woods that have been spread by the Guardians emphasises their reliance on the guardians (as if they are their parents)
🌳As well as this the recurring symbol of fences symbolises life’s limitations for the clones
The open plan office 🏢
🏢 symbolizes the students’ gradually diminishing sense of possibility for the future.
🏢Ruth and Kathy first see the office in a magazine, Ruth refers to as her “dream future.”
🏢 In Norfolk, the office signals the closing off of possibility. The woman in the office turns out to not be Ruth’s possible, solidifying the impossibility of Ruth’s dream future.
🏢The office itself has floor-to-ceiling glass windows, this reveals they can observe it from the outside, but cannot actually participate in it.
🏢The open-plan office reappears on a billboard in part 3. It is a reminder of past dreams at a moment when the future for all three has already been set in motion.
🏢Yet the open-plan office also remains a symbol of hope, as Ruth hands Madame’s address to Kathy and Tommy underneath the billboard. Ruth knows that her life is almost over, but Madame’s address introduces the possibility that at least Tommy and Kathy might extend their time together.
Quotations for the symbol of the open plan office 🏢
PART 2=
”I suppose it was mainly us newcomers who talked about “dream futures””
PART 3=
“Remember how you used to go on about it? How you’d one day work in an office like that one?””
Quotations for the symbol of the woods around Hailsham and fences🌳
PART 1=
“All we could see really was a dark fringe of trees”
“It’s just as well the fences at Hailsham aren’t electrified. “
PART 3=
“Then we came to a barbed wire fence, which was tilted and rusted, the wire itself yanked all over the place. ”
Quotations for the symbol of the stranded boat 🚤
“I could now see how it’s paint was cracking, and how the timber frames of the little cabin were crumbling away.“
“ghostly trunks poking out of the soil”
Quotations for the symbol of Ruth’s pencil case ✏️
“Let’s agree I got it in the sales”
“ she was at a complete loss for words, and had turned away on the verge of tears. ”
Tommy’s animal drawings 🖼
🖼 Tommy’s animal drawings are described as being mechanical
🖼 This symbolises how the clones have been raised to believe that they are humans.
🖼 However, inside they feel manufactured, like objects being used by society as they are not fully human like everyone else.
Quotations for the symbol of Tommy’s animal drawings 🖼
PART 2=
“It took a moment to see they were animals at all. My first impression was like (…) the back off a radio set”
