53 pages • 1 hour read
Ali BenjaminThe Thing About Jellyfish
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Human Desire for Control
Suzy’s primary conflicts with Franny and her peers, her plans to travel to Australia, and her fears about the world all stem from her inability to control events and to control other people. Suzy learns that life cannot be controlled at two main points in the novel: when she loses Franny’s friendship, and when she loses Franny when Franny dies in the ocean.
The news of Franny’s death is difficult for Suzy to comprehend for several reasons; Suzy is young and ill-equipped to deal with the loss and she feels shock because two days elapsed between the drowning and Suzy’s learning about it; she also experiences a lack of control at the funeral, feeling surprise and anger at the number of strangers who attend and the emotional reactions of Franny’s other friends. Suzy cannot accept her mother’s explanation that “[s]ometimes things just happen” (17) because Suzy cannot accept the uncontrollability of life’s events. Instead, Suzy fixates on a way to understand the tragedy scientifically. This rational approach to death leads Suzy to learn about Jamie and decide to seek his help: “I want him to restore some order to this world” (123).
Suzy’s decision to suspend idle conversation and not speak to anyone unless necessary is another way she tries to exert some control over her life. Her “not-talking” prompts responses from others who are steered by her silence, giving her some control. Smaller uncontrollable situations stand for bigger issues with control, such as Suzy’s frizzy hair. While trying to tame Suzy’s hair with a hair product, Franny describes her hair as “impossible” just as their interests begin to diverge, signaling a loss of control within the context of their friendship. Symbolically, Suzy tries to regain some control by washing out Franny’s hair product when Franny goes home.
Suzy’s concerns about the world’s size, scope, and problems demonstrate that she fears her own lack of control. The thought of Earth as a speck in the vast universe is scary to Suzy, as are some other aspects of nature that she studies in science; for example, an animal that falls prey to a predator has no control, and humans have no control over the expansion of the universe.
The Impulse to Rationalize Loss
Even before Franny loses her life, Suzy struggles with the deterioration of their friendship and eventual separation. Though Franny makes the effort to bring Suzy in to her new friendship circle, Suzy rejects Franny’s attempt, rationalizing that the two of them belong along together at lunch and that Franny isn’t thinking clearly; Suzy insists that she and Franny return to her old table the next day. When Franny chooses to eat at Aubrey’s table again, Suzy follows, but her conversation topics turn the group against her, and Suzy retreats, deciding to eat alone. By spring, she rationalizes that if she simply apologizes for her embarrassing conversation, she and Franny can start being friends again. Franny rejects Suzy’s attempt, and the relationship continues to deteriorate at the sixth grade camp out.
When Suzy attempts to repair their relationship, she sends Franny a message. In Suzy’s mind, it is perfectly rational to put her own frozen urine in Franny’s locker, feeling certain the message will enable them to start over. To Suzy, not only is urine the topic of the last conversation they had together at Aubrey’s lunch table, but an element of balance makes the message justifiable; Franny caused Suzy pain by rejecting her and spitting on her, but Suzy’s use of urine, a sterile fluid, is not as bad as Franny’s use of unhygienic spit. Suzy experiences stress over getting caught, which suggests that no matter how deeply she rationalizes her actions, she knows they are unacceptable.
Suzy turns to rational processes again to try to make sense of Franny’s death. Her hypothesis that Franny dies of a jellyfish sting is unlike to be proven. Suzy tells herself, however, that the Australian jellyfish expert Jamie will help her prove her idea to everyone, if only she can meet him face to face. She rationalizes her secret plans and her theft of money. Suzy’s shock at the airline counter when she realizes she cannot get to Australia parallels the moment when she cannot catch Franny’s eye in the school hallway. Her deep, weeks-long rationalization that Australia is the key to her quest compounds her difficulty in explaining “how something impossible could become the only possible thing” (300).
Challenges to Interpersonal Communication
Suzy tries to communicate with others in her life through both sound and silence, but she finds her messages twisted, misunderstood, or not received at all. This inability to communicate is one of Suzy’s greatest conflicts, both internally and externally; as Dr. Legs reminds Suzy, communication is a basic human need, and Suzy’s unhappiness results when this need is unfulfilled.
Suzy finds it difficult to convey accurate meaning through her spoken messages when she and Franny begin to drift apart. Suzy cannot connect with Franny when she talks about boys. At the lunch table with Aubrey, Molly, Franny, and other girls, Suzy tries to contribute to conversation but chooses topics that are inappropriate and “weird” to the girls. In another scene, Suzy tries to explain the Garbage Vortex to her father but sees that he did not want those details in response to a simple question.
At the sixth grade campout, Suzy bravely volunteers to share what she hears in the mix of sounds in the environment: “It’s an orchestra” (154). The teacher scoffs at her verbalized response: “While Suzy here listens to Mozart in the trees, I want you to hear something else” (155). Later, her ability to better communicate with Justin serves as a juxtaposition to this moment, when he agrees with her that the difference made by his ADHD medication is “[l]ike the difference between hearing random noises versus hearing an orchestra” (243). Justin’s understanding of her verbal message shows a potential connection that can turn into a fulfilling relationship, as compared to the lost friendship with Franny, with whom Suzy was no longer able to communicate.
Suzy tries to communicate silently throughout the book as well, both before and after she gives up most verbal messages by not-talking. Her silent message to Franny using melted urine does not have the intended effect, because, as Suzy believes, in order for the message to get through completely, Franny needs to make eye contact and she never does. After Franny’s death and funeral, Suzy opts to go quiet, choosing not-talking: “If people were silent, they could hear the noise of their own lives better. If people were silent, it would make what they did say, whenever they chose to say it, more important” (134). She knows people have great difficulty reading each other’s unspoken signs, comparing her failed message to Franny to an “unfinished sentence” (210).
