All the Colors of the Dark

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes mentions of child abduction, abuse, sexual assault, predatory behavior, mental illness, violence against women, domestic violence, abortion, and suicide.

Throughout the novel, pirates serve as a symbol of Patch’s identity and sense of self. As a child, his mother begins his obsession: “[H]e was into pirates because he had been born with only one eye, and his mother peddled the romance of a cutlass and eye patch because often for kids like him the flair of fiction dulled a reality too severe” (3). His mother calls him her “little pirate” and sews eyepatches for him, hoping that the excitement of the stories will bring him joy. Patch latches onto these ideas and insists that he is a pirate, looking to stories of historical pirates for inspiration and courage. Though kids at school mock him for his eyepatch and his obsession, Saint joins him in making up stories. After his kidnapping, Patch is no longer interested in childish games, and Saint longs for him to care about his old interests: “She wanted him to be a pirate once more” (163). However, The Lasting Effects of Trauma have begun to take root, changing Patch into someone who no longer experiences the world with childlike wonder.

In adulthood, Patch fluctuates between seeing the pirate as a romantic hero outside the law and seeing it as a useless childhood fantasy. During his string of bank robberies, he quotes pirate facts to Saint in phone calls loaded with melodramatic dialogue: “Edward Low. Fearsome. Some reckon he was hanged in France. But one story has it he escaped to the Caribbean and saw out his days on the beach, in paradise” (340). He tells Saint, “They say I’m a pirate. And you’re a lawman” (304-5). After his arrest and learning that he has a daughter, he resolves to put away his former life, including the childhood pirate memorabilia he still clings to. He believes that being present for Charlotte means seeing himself as a criminal, rather than a romantic figure.

However, by the novel’s end, he is living on the run in the Outer Banks on a ship, fulfilling the idealized view of his childhood fantasies but staying close by in case Charlotte needs him. Charlotte and Saint find him because a man tells them, “Blackbeard […] The pirate, Edward Teach. Of all the places in the world, and he chose to hide out in the Banks” (588). This clue leads them to Patch and his ship. In the novel’s final scene, he gives Saint the only painting he has ever made for her, an image of them as children: the pirate and beekeeper. He has embraced their friendship and the idea of himself as a pirate. Earlier in the novel, Patch says that “pirates wore eye patches to adjust to the light and dark above and below deck during raids” (318). The old woman he is speaking with responds, “So you’re in the light now, but you’ve come from the dark” (318). It is at the novel’s end when Patch finally comes from the dark into the light. In these final pages, the pirate becomes a symbolic figure for Patch of someone who can live between the dark and the light in the world—pursuing freedom outside the law but not abandoning justice.