64 pages • 2 hours read
Douglas WesterbekeA Short Walk Through a Wide World
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A 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 Lasting Impact of Brief Connections
The many people whom Aubry meets along her journey demonstrate how people can find and foster emotional connections even when they know each other only briefly. These brief connections can have a lasting impact, often in surprising and unintended ways. From Aubry’s point of view, it is clear that the many characters she meets impact her life both positively and negatively, thus influencing her view of the world and herself, altering the choices she makes. For instance, Aubry’s encounter with Uzair, the first man she loves, has a deep and damaging impact on her outlook on life. Though many doctors have already tried to cure her sickness, Uzair’s intensity and assurance that he will fix her initially give Aubry hope that her sickness can be rationally explained and treated. However, by the end of their relationship, Uzair’s obsessive need to cure her proves to be dismissive, controlling, and cruel. After escaping Uzair, Aubry relinquishes any hope for a cure that she might still have possessed. Worse yet, Aubry’s love affair with Uzair painfully and negatively alters her perceptions of love. She attests that she previously believed that love was compassionate, gentle, and kind. Now, she understands that love can also be cruel, possessive, and manipulative. For many years after this, Aubry stops looking for or desiring love at all.
Aubry’s week-long relationship with Lionel has the opposite effect. His demonstration of gentle understanding and tenderness shows Aubry that love is still possible. It is, in fact, something that she is allowed to hope for and accept when it appears. Though these two relationships are brief, lasting only days, they each form deeply impactful connections for Aubry, with lasting consequences. Crucially, however, this impact is not one-sided but moves in both directions. Just as each encounter influences Aubry’s life in powerful but often unexpected ways, so does her presence impact each person she meets. Lionel is, again, an excellent example because he is one of the few people Aubry meets twice in her lifetime. When they meet again 15 years later, Lionel confesses that he still regrets not traveling with her. Though they only knew each other for a week, and Lionel is now happily married and has a child, the feelings of his time with her still linger, so much so that he has decided to take his child on a trip to see the world, as Aubry has done, before he dies.
These are not the only instances of the emotional connections that form between people and the lingering effects that these connections have. Aubry’s meetings with the Prince and Qalima significantly alter her understanding of her own sickness and the purpose she has been given in life. The lasting impact of Aubry’s conversation with Qalima is so profound that, despite appearing in only a single scene, Qalima’s words and her promise of a birthday wish return in the final scene of the novel. However, Aubry’s impact is also apparent. For instance, her sister Pauline studies medicine purely because she wishes to help her sister. Marta follows Aubry halfway across the world after falling in love with her photo. She then spends two years traveling with her, proving that her feelings are not a momentary blip but a deeply embedded part of her life. With every example, the narrative demonstrates that brief encounters can have profound impacts.
The Limits of Scientific Rationalism
Another major theme of the novel centers on the limits of scientific rationalism in the face of the mysteries that defy rational explanation. To contextualize this theme, it is important to understand the place of science in late-19th-century society. This was a period of rapid development in all areas of science, from medicine to physics to archeology. Scientists and even the public began to eschew older, traditional modes of thinking, which gave weight to intuition, faith, and even mysticism, and now argued that science and rationality could and would explain and quantify all things in the universe. In many ways, this proved true, as scientists were able to identify and name the physical building blocks of the universe and build a greater understanding of biology and evolution. However, the novel argues that the world remains full of wonders and mysteries that actively defy explanation or understanding. This is a particularly fitting theme for a fabulist narrative, which, by its nature, weaves together real-world settings with magical or fantastical elements that are not explained, or in some cases even commented on, within the narrative.
Throughout the narrative, Aubry witnesses many magical and inexplicable things, including the puzzle ball, the infinite library, the impossible bird that she hunts with Pathik, Vincente and his children, and her sickness itself. Each of these underscores the inherent strangeness of the world and the inadequacy of science and reason to fully explain the mystery that is existence. Uzair refuses to believe that there are things his science cannot master. He is so certain that he can cure Aubry’s sickness—and that he understands it better than she does—that he refuses to listen to her when she tells him that his “cure” will kill her. This sickness is so far beyond the reach of scientific reasoning that not only can no one cure it, but no one can even give it a name. This namelessness is especially troubling for a 19th-century scientific culture that is obsessed with imposing order on the world by naming and categorizing everything in it. Vaughan Holcombe wants the name of Aubry’s sickness so that he can properly catalog it among his experiences and thus stop fearing it. Even Lionel suggests that they name the sickness after Aubry, in the fashion of other diseases that have been named after the first person known to have them. However, neither Aubry nor the narrative makes any effort to name the sickness. Even when the voice of the sickness bids farewell and leaves Aubry in the library, the narrative staunchly refuses to explain who or what it really is. Following her experience with Uzair, Aubry concludes that her only option is to accept the sickness and learn to live with it because understanding it will never be an option.
In direct defiance of the supposed supremacy of scientific reasoning, the novel suggests that there are some mysteries in the world that actively resist understanding. The oldest girl in Vincente’s camp states that “impossible things […] are inevitable” (380), and Vincente himself declares that he has stopped asking questions about how things work and merely accepted that they do. This, then, is the novel’s answer to the question of why: Some things cannot be explained, only experienced.
The Tension Between Exploration and Rootedness
Aubry’s mysterious sickness is both a gift and a curse: It drives her forward to explore the world and grants her almost supernatural powers of endurance, but it also prevents her from ever staying in one place long enough to establish lasting relationships. As soon as she starts to care for the people around her, she is forced to move on. For much of the novel, Aubry believes that her sickness and the travel it requires are a form of punishment for her selfish behavior as a child. She believes that her neighbor’s baby died because she refused to relinquish her puzzle ball to the wishing well. Aubry and both sisters are convinced of this, which is why her sisters do not want Aubry to find out about the baby’s death at first, knowing that she will feel responsible. The timing does make a compelling case. After all, Aubry falls ill for the first time the evening after she ran away from the wishing well. However, Aubry’s attempt decades later to fix her mistake and earn forgiveness—by throwing the puzzle ball into the well she finds near Pathik’s home—fails, suggesting that her interpretation of events is wrong.
While Aubry views her sickness and its enforced travel as a punishment, several characters suggest that it is, in fact, a gift and may even be the entire purpose of her existence. Lionel first suggests this in Chapter 18 when he reminds Aubry that confinement, not movement, is the most universal form of punishment for criminals. Aubry herself acknowledges that many people she meets view her condition with wistful envy, wishing that they, too, could leave the familiar behind them and travel. The Prince offers an even more positive interpretation of Aubry’s life when he argues that Aubry’s purpose in life is to bear witness to the wonders and that the world itself may desire such a witness. Qalima even suggests that some wonders of the world would not exist if Aubry were not there to see and experience them. The sickness itself seems to confirm this theory in the final chapters.
This is not to diminish the real suffering and loss that Aubry experiences on her journey, which even the sickness itself acknowledges in the final chapters. Aubry is exiled from her home and forbidden from finding a new one. Every time she makes a connection with someone, or even falls in love, she is forced to abandon them to save her own life. The pain of these forced separations suggests that even if Aubry’s sickness has a gift-giving purpose in her life and offers a breadth of experience unmatched by anyone she meets, it comes with significant costs. By accepting the call to adventure symbolized by the puzzle ball, Aubry chooses both the gift of seeing the world and the burden of exile.
Once Aubry completes her life’s purpose—bearing witness to the world and recording her experiences in the book she leaves in the infinite library—she is rewarded for her efforts. The voice of the sickness leaves her, and she is once again kicked out of the library to reconnect with the world. Aubry assumes that her sickness will not return now that the voice is gone, but it strikes one last time, driving her forward to meet Vincente. The events leading up to the conclusion—Aubry finding the well a third time, realizing that she no longer needs to count her days, and receiving Qalima’s birthday message—all indicate that meeting Vincente and the children he cares for is her reward. Even the title of the final chapter, “Home,” confirms that she has been released from her previous purpose to travel and is now free to make herself a home.
