38 pages • 1 hour read
Heidi W. DurrowThe Girl Who Fell From The Sky
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2010A 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
Birds
Bird imagery appears at many different points in the novel, a repeating motif of freedom and flight.
Brick is so fascinated by the birds he sees in Peterson Field Guide to the Birds of Eastern and Central North America that he mistakes the falling bodies of Nella and her children for large birds flying past his window. His error is ironic: Nella’s suicidal and filicidal jump has freed her and her children from a life of pain and injustice.
Brick identifies with the birds he admires, and the novel increasingly links his character with birds in a more specific way. When Brick visits Rachel in the hospital and learns how to play her father Roger’s harmonica, Roger tells Brick that his ability to make music is bird-like: “’You hear how you’re making a song out of what’s just a whistle. Like a bird,’ the man said” (83). Later in the novel, Brick undergoes a migratory pattern, taking flight when he runs away from home and eventually taking flight again to return home.
The novel’s closing image is that of birds in flight. As Brick and Rachel talk in the park, he throws a coin into the lake and makes a wish, startling a group of birds. At this moment, Rachel notices a swan fly away and secretly wishes that her brother Robbie “had been a bird” (264) and that her mother and siblings had been able to fly.
Rachel’s Blue Bottle
In times of emotional duress, Rachel imagines that she has a blue bottle inside of her in which she can safely store her pain. When Rachel can no longer endure her grandmother’s criticism at the end of a confusing night with Jesse, the imaginary blue bottle breaks and Rachel can no longer repress her emotions.
The bottle is resonant in a variety of ways. It holds toxins that threaten to harm Rachel the more of them she ingests—an image that echoes the bottles of alcohol consumed by the dysfunctional adults in Rachel’s life. The bottle’s blue color is associated with feelings of melancholy and loss, as Rachel explains to Drew after they go to a performance by the blues artist Etta James. Blues music, characterized by emotions related to loss and pain, resonates deeply with Rachel, and her appreciation of the music inspires her to tell Drew about her blue bottle—the perfect receptacle for her own blues.
The Harmonica
When Brick visits Rachel in the hospital, her father Roger teaches him to play the harmonica. Roger gives Brick the harmonica, and Brick later uses it to find a safe place to live after being homeless in Kansas City.
When Brick first sees Rachel in Portland, he is playing her father’s harmonica. At this moment, the reader is aware of the origins of the harmonica but Rachel is not. The dramatic irony serves to enhance the pathos of this moment: Brick, a young man whose physical transience disguises a steady and reliable heart, is playing an instrument he received from Rachel’s father, whose emotional unreliability has led directly to her current state of isolation.
