33 pages • 1 hour read
David AuburnProof
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 2000A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Notebook
The notebooks are a symbol of Robert’s mental illness. He was a graphomaniac, writing compulsively and believing that he was continuing to do important work. Writing everything down while simultaneously losing one’s memory and mental faculties suggests an attempt to preserve what the afflicted person is losing. Catherine’s proof is not only a proof in the mathematical sense, but also in terms of evidence of Catherine’s ability to contribute to the field. When Hal finds Catherine’s notebook and believes that Robert wrote the proof, he says, “It means that during a time when everyone thought your dad was crazy… or barely functioning… he was doing some of the most important mathematics in the world” (47).
Similarly, Catherine wrote the proof during a period when she seemed to be barely functioning. She left school and seemed to be spending too much time in bed or reading trashy magazines. By writing in one of her father’s notebooks, Catherine shows a reluctance to own her work. Her life has not been her own, since she has been devoting it to caring for her father. Now that he is dead, Catherine is faced with the daunting responsibility of living her own life and trying to fulfill her potential. If Catherine hadn’t claimed the proof, it would have served as evidence of her father’s continued existence during the years in which he was unable to work, but owning the proof means that she opens herself up to criticism and the expectation to continue producing.
The House
When Robert dies, Claire is immediately ready to sell the family’s house in Chicago, despite the fact that Catherine is still living there. To Claire, the house represents what she escaped by moving to New York. It is haunted by memories of their father’s illness. It is a symbol of heredity and inheritance, which in the case of Robert’s children, might mean mental decline as much as it might mean genius. Claire is determined to remove Catherine from the house as if that might change Catherine’s potential genetic fate. Allowing the university to take ownership of the house is a way of allowing them to take ownership of their father’s memory, razing over the parts where he couldn’t take care of himself and immortalizing him as the academic genius he was in his youth. For Catherine, remaining in the house is an issue as she tries to find her own identity separate from her father’s.
Notably, the play takes place entirely on the porch of the house rather than inside. The porch is a place to escape the house. Catherine goes outside to get away from the revelers at her father’s funeral celebration. Robert sits outside in the cold of a Chicago winter because he feels stifled and unable to work inside the house. In Chicago, large portions of the year are inhospitable outside due to freezing temperatures, but the house is a stagnant place, the place where Catherine, like Sophie Germain, is trapped. The porch, by contrast, becomes a liminal space where Catherine can free herself from the house without leaving entirely. At the end of the play, it isn’t clear whether Catherine will leave Chicago altogether, stay in the house and cancel the sale, or rent a separate home in Chicago, but for the first time, she has the option to leave.
Catherine’s Birthday
The play begins around midnight on Catherine’s 25th birthday. She drinks champagne by herself, reluctant to celebrate. It has been a week since her father died, and this birthday symbolizes a sort of rebirth in which she must reinvent herself outside of her father’s shadow. Hal’s attempt at a gift–the notebook in which Robert expresses his gratitude for Catherine’s sacrifice–highlights the fact that Catherine has presumably given up what would theoretically be her most productive years for the sake of her father.
Catherine’s birthday marks the passage of time as she becomes another year older and further off-track on her academic path. The play supports this theory when Catherine decides to attend Northwestern during Robert’s year of lucidity, and he points out that she is behind and will need to catch up.
Birthdays are a way to quantify lost time or the limited time remaining in one’s academic potential. As Robert loses his memory, he forgets Catherine’s birthday, erasing this quantification. Catherine does not make the effort to remind him, since she seems to treat each birthday as a loss. As Catherine grows older, she gets closer to both the possibility of inheriting her father’s illness and the expected loss of productivity comes with age. Without the careful marking of the calendar, age becomes less quantifiable. While there are statistics and predictions about the peak of academic performance and the onset of a mental illness that is most likely schizophrenia, the human body does not always follow the timetable of scientific expectation.
