48 pages • 1 hour read
Julie ClarkThe Last Flight
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A 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
Bruises
Content Warning: This section of the guide references domestic abuse.
Bruises are the first bald indication to the reader of the secret life that Claire Cook has been forced to endure for more than 10 years. In the opening chapter, amid the glamour and glitz of wealthy Manhattanites gathered to raise money for worthy causes, Claire Cook suddenly adjusts her elaborate designer scarf—not to make a fashion statement, but rather to hide the tell-tale purplish-green bruise on her arm, a remnant of a raging argument she had with her apparently picture-perfect husband two days earlier. It is not the first such mark he has left on her during their marriage; over the years, the bruises have come to mark “the progression of Rory’s rage across [her] skin” (7). Challenging a man as powerful as Rory Cook is not an option; what Claire is left with is applying makeup to the bruises and maintaining the status quo.
The bruises symbolize the dilemma of women entangled in an abusive relationship and The Corrosive Effects of Secrets. Like the hidden life she lives, the bruises are too easily covered up, rendering Claire’s life a terrifying charade. Whatever the occasion—a fancy fundraiser, an office meeting, even a simple dinner at home with Rory—the efforts to keep the bruises covered symbolize the error in Claire’s strategy: keep the violence secret. As the CNN reporter assures her more than a week after she tries to flee, the only way to stop the abuse is to come forward publicly. In other words, Claire must learn to stop covering up the violence.
The Internet
In its own way, the Internet emerges as a viable character, if not the hero of the novel. The narrative features regular messages, news reports, and emails, each transmission set off in its own typographic font. Unlike the novel’s face-to-face interactions, the Internet is a source of information undistorted by lies and, in its highest expression, a promise of help.
It is through her Googling efforts that Eva at last can make her peace with her mother, who abandoned her to Child Welfare when Eva was only two; Googling allows Claire the opportunity to sort through the conflicting evidence about her husband’s role in the immolation of his first wife; it is through text messages and emails that Danielle, Liz’s daughter and Rory’s secretary, finds the opportunity at last to help Claire. In rigging the connections with her husband’s email account and his text messages, Claire can maintain some control over her flight to freedom. The Internet connections with Rory’s computer provide Claire growing evidence of the depravity of her husband and the viciousness with which he deals with those who trouble his world. The CNN website that Claire visits opens her up to the implications of the plane crash, helps her monitor her status as newly deceased, and in the end offers her the only authentic strategy for her emotional emancipation from her abusive husband.
In a novel that celebrates The Power of Female Solidarity, the medium for that solidarity is the open-field of electronic communication.
The Glass Bluebird
The day Liz’s Christmas tree is delivered, Liz gifts Eva with a Christmas ornament—a delicate handblown glass bluebird: “The bluebird is the harbinger of happiness […] That’s my Christmas wish for you” (171).
Nothing in Eva’s experience prepares her for the friendship of the sixty-something woman from Princeton. Despite her academic credentials, Liz is entirely unpretentious and welcomes Eva into her home without judging her. In Liz, Eva finds a surrogate mother; their friendship develops in the weeks after Eva confirms through a Google search the death of her own birth mother. Liz listens to Eva’s story, her slide into a criminal life working for a drug kingpin, and offers hope that with the right decisions, Eva can find her way to the life that Liz is sure she deserves.
Abandoned by her mother into the foster care system, used and betrayed by her boyfriend in college, and maneuvered into using her chemistry skills to get entangled in the underworld of Berkeley drug operations, Eva is full of self-loathing. The message that she deserves to be happy, symbolized by the bluebird (an ornament that Eva will keep even as she prepares to run), gives Eva the hope that perhaps she can survive and even regain the promising life she once had.
Mirrors and Reflections
Eva and Claire’s “flights” are attempts to escape not only from danger but from the people they have become. They thus have similar moments of self-examination suggested by their reflection in a window. Disgusted with herself as she sits next to Liz—who knows nothing about Eva’s drug dealing—Eva “stare[s] at her dim reflection in the dark train window […and] [is] struck with a thought so clear, so pure, it sen[ds] a shiver through her. I’m not going to do this anymore” (127). Seeing the darkness of the person she is, Eva resolves to be someone else. Likewise, Claire considers her identity before and after dying her hair to match Eva’s blonde shade: “I stare at my reflection in the mirror—not quite Eva, not quite Claire” (). Claire feels she has lost herself in her marriage to Rory, but she is not yet sure of who she is independent of that relationship.
