Echo Mountain

Ellie’s mother is the novel’s second most important character, or deuteragonist. While Ellie narrates the story from her perspective, her emotions and attitude are largely shaped by her mother. After her husband’s accident, Ellie’s mother shuts down emotionally, especially toward Ellie. She sees Ellie as being wild and holds her responsible for the accident, and Ellie allows her to view her that way. Ellie admires her mother’s courage and strength, regularly remarking on how much affection she has toward her mother despite the way she is often treated: “She was brave, too. Brave enough to give up town. To go with my father to the mountain. To start over in a place with no roads. No doctors. Almost no people. But her kind of courage had very little wild in it. Very little of the mountain” (101). Despite her adaptability, Ellie’s mother feels “like a stranger in this new skin” (219). She metaphorically compares herself to a chameleon, but she is always filled with the sense that she is not where she belongs.

Ellie’s mother also feels a strangeness toward her daughter, although she eventually reconciles this as she sees the way people revere Ellie’s healing abilities. The Duality in All Things affects Ellie’s mother, as it does Ellie, in more than one sense. Not only is she caught between her memories of town life and being a music teacher and her present life on the mountain, but she is also caught between feeling love and protection for her daughter and blaming her for the accident. Ellie’s mother fluctuates between hot and cold, banishing Ellie to the dog shed one night and offering her a hearty breakfast the next morning to atone for her harsh behavior.

Ellie’s mother experiences a shift in character when she first stops objecting to Ellie going up the mountain to visit Cate. This shift progresses, and soon she is offering to accompany Ellie there. Although Esther goes instead, this marks a change in Ellie’s mother. Ellie’s mother then welcomes Cate into their home and does what she can to make her well. Ellie’s mother symbolizes the pain of the family in the wake of their father’s accident. After he was struck down, she stopped playing her mandolin, a source of joy for her and her family. Much like Captan, Ellie’s mother remains quiet and distant throughout the novel until she finally breaks down her own barriers and plays a song to accompany Captan’s howls. In hearing the song of the person he loves, Ellie’s father wakes up, relieving months of tension for the whole family.

Cate, Mrs. Cleary, or the “old hag” is an archetype of an elderly healer woman. She is, in other words, healing personified. Cate was a nurse who worked in the town where Ellie’s family lived before the stock market crash. She treated Esther when she was young, and thus her bond with Ellie’s family goes back a long time. In the novel’s exposition, Cate is nothing more than a mysterious figure who possibly lives on the mountain peak. It is not until Ellie goes searching for her and finds her wounded with “a clot of maggots feasting on her leg” (99) that Cate’s true character is slowly revealed. It is also through Cate that Ellie learns the importance of judging people for their actions rather than their appearance or oddities, such as the fact that Cate lives alone and clings to a toy doll.

Although Cate is a nurse with many books, she seems now to use only natural healing methods. She never goes to town to collect supplies and thus resorts to using maggots or honey to help herself heal. While these methods do slow down the process of decay, Cate’s health is not ensured until she is visited by a doctor and stitched up. Despite this, Ellie learns a great deal from Cate about alternative methods, as well as how much she values compassion and helping others. Cate also teaches Ellie how to lance a wound and professes that Ellie “is also a hag, you know” (300). Cate sees in Ellie a younger version of herself—someone who has a desire to help others and will stop at nothing until she succeeds.

Cate represents another world, a life on the mountain before the townspeople ever arrived. While she did work in the town, she grew up on the mountain. That was also where her son and his family lived and where Larkin and his mother still do. When Cate’s son died, she was overcome by grief and came to find solace in his work cabin. She is attached to her son’s old tools and the memories they represent, and the only one she allows to use them is his son, Larkin. Cate’s son crafted the mandolin that symbolizes the connection and healing that occurs in the novel. Cate’s dog, Captan, who was long quiet like Ellie’s mother, begins to sing “the song he’d apparently been saving for [Ellie’s mother]” in Ellie’s father’s room (335). He inspires Ellie’s mother to finally pick up her mandolin, and together their singing awakens Ellie’s father—a long-awaited resolution to a source of conflict for Ellie and her family.

Ellie’s father is physically present but mentally absent for most of the novel. His presence calms and soothes his family, despite his being in a coma, but he has little influence on the story otherwise. Instead, it is Ellie’s Persistence in the Face of Obstacles and drive to heal her father that make him important to the plot and to her characterization. Furthermore, Ellie is most like her father in character, and she learned many of the skills she uses in the story from him. Ellie also helps bring her father back to life by bringing Cate and her dog down to the cabin, which eventually leads to the mandolin song that wakes him. It is through her father (and also Cate) that Ellie learns how to become a healer and, on top of that, learns how rewarding it is to help those who need her.

Ellie’s father is a strong, compassionate man who brought his family to the mountain after the stock market crash of the 1930s. He was previously a skilled tailor capable of embroidering ivy into clothing, and Ellie wears a jacket he made for her every day. Ellie’s father knew little about life in the wilderness when he arrived on Echo Mountain with his family, but he adapted quickly. It was his persistence that first inspired Ellie and that propelled his family through the most difficult times when they first arrived and were sleeping in a tent.

The character of Ellie’s mother is also shaped by Ellie’s father and the fact that he is in a coma. She becomes cold and distant after his accident, allowing Ellie to take the blame for everything. Ellie longs for her mother’s affection and relishes the small moments when she gets a hug or a touch on the shoulder. As Ellie’s mother transforms from a grief-stricken woman back into her old self, albeit slowly, Ellie notices changes in her that give her hope of her family’s healing. One such occasion occurs when Larkin’s mother comes to their home and Ellie’s mother defends their bedridden father: “I mean my husband, who built this cabin and made these clothes we’re wearing and cut a notch in this mountain for our garden there and a great deal more” (211).

Samuel is Ellie’s younger brother. He is a bull-headed, risk-taking young boy who takes after Ellie and his father. Samuel relishes the disgusting—for example, becoming excited after touching a large, hairy spider—and seems to enjoy life on the mountainside. Although he does not show it often, Ellie knows that her brother worries about and grieves over their father. He is often found in the room with him, watching him sleep and listening to Esther’s stories. Samuel tries to act tough around Ellie and avoids showing his pain or fear. He feels the need to act like the man of the house with his father in bed. He often openly insists on not being as young as he is: “You make me sound like a baby. I’m not a baby, Ellie” (75). Ellie also observes that her brother craves the attention of men while their father is mentally absent. When she takes him to the Peterson farm, Samuel enthusiastically helps Mr. Peterson clean his horse’s hoof and pull a thorn out of it, talking “in a voice much like Mr. Peterson’s” (49).

Ellie loves her brother dearly and describes him as “a here and now sort of boy if there ever was one” (319). She loves him for his rashness and foolish youth. Samuel feels a similar bond with and protectiveness toward Ellie, following her when she goes to fish and holding her dog Quiet, crying over the thought of his sister losing her new friend.

Larkin is Cate’s grandson and Ellie’s close friend on the mountain. He starts out as a mysterious stranger who leaves Ellie carvings as gifts when her family first arrives on the mountain. Ellie first meets Larkin when she goes to Cate’s cabin to check on her and finds him there. He is “thin, winter-pale, with hair as thick and black as a bear’s” (128). He seems cautious but polite. Ellie enlists Larkin’s help with tending to Cate’s wound, which he does graciously, and Ellie finds that Larkin possesses the same compassion for others that she does, although his is in a slightly different form. Larkin is learning to read from Cate and hopes to become a luthier like his father someday.

Larkin and Ellie grow closer as the novel progresses, opening up to one another and understanding each other’s grief. Larkin lost his father to a sudden illness several years ago, and Ellie’s father is in a coma. As such, they relate to one another. Ellie and Larkin come from different worlds, however, and Larkin admits this when he explains his reasoning for hiding in the trees while gifting the carvings. He was always told not to trust townspeople, but he saw Ellie as being different and chose to give her a chance. Larkin’s mother attempts to keep him within her sight at all times, fearing he will someday leave her, but Larkin has a will of his own and goes to see his grandmother whenever he chooses. When Cate is brought down to Ellie’s cabin, Larkin vanishes and returns days later with the doctor who stitches up Cate’s wound, having struck a deal with the doctor to craft him a mandolin once he learns how. By the novel’s conclusion, Larkin and Ellie seem to be growing affectionate toward one another; they hug, worry about one another, and spend time alone talking. At the end of the novel, Larkin carves a figure of himself and puts it on the shelf next to the carving of Ellie.

Esther is Ellie’s older sister and, like their mother, becomes cold and cruel toward Ellie after the accident. Esther is deeply attached to town life and refuses to settle into her family’s new existence on the mountainside; “Town was Esther’s mountain” (215). She acts pompous and stays inside where she can remain clean and proper as much as possible. Ellie describes her sister’s appearance as follows: “her nightgown clean, her hair combed, her hands shiny with the tallow she rubbed on them before bed each night” (153). Esther does show compassion toward her parents and reads to her father every night (though she admits this is largely for her own benefit, to feel useful in some way). Esther is, in truth, in as much pain as her sister, but she hides it behind a wall.

Esther blames Ellie for the accident, believing that she was in the way when the tree was falling. Ellie allows her sister to think this, protecting Samuel from feeling responsible. Ellie is pained by the way her sister treats her and remembers sitting on Esther’s lap to listen to stories when she was little. Ellie hopes that Esther will heal when her father does. As it turns out, Esther begins to change long before then, when she offers to go up the mountain with Ellie. When Esther meets Cate, she realizes that Cate is Mrs. Cleary, the kind nurse who treated Esther’s earaches when she was a young girl. Esther spends the night with Cate, tending to her and reminiscing. By the novel’s conclusion, Esther is by no means a fully transformed character; however, she slowly learns to forgive Ellie and accept her place on the mountain.