Diving Deeper

I would like to dig deeper into metaphorical thought and its influence on story by examining the water themes in two famous novels. Let us begin with the young adult novel Holes by Louis Sachar.

Water, in its absence and presence, tells this story.

The first lines set up water as a character, a ghost narrator, a mystical entity in this novel: “There is no lake at Camp Green Lake . . . it is just a dry, flat wasteland.”

By the six line, the reader understands the powerful absence or presence of water: Its absence having dissolved an entire community. Water goes on to tell this story in foundational, archetypal symbolism. It is a thematic metaphor of such strength that it seems almost a character in its potency.

In Karen Hesse’s Out of the Dust, water’s symbolism is a mystic signature. Water is a vehicle for transformation that enhances this story’s foundational narrative. It provides a narrative structure: a rising action, a conflict, a climax, and a resolution. It reflects even the affective climate of the main characters of the story; it is a method of foreshadowing. Water plays the role of an omniscient ghost narrator that, by its presence, absence and form reflects the affective states of the main characters, creates action, conflict, climax, and resolution. Water in essence tells this story through its form and formlessness. Its absence and presence command the plot.

Both authors tell these stories through the metaphoric resonance and expanding poetic gravity of water. Water acts as an omniscient ghost narrator and tells these vastly different stories of character, time, conflict, and place through its form and formlessness.