Lost Children Archive

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

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Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

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Symbols & Motifs

Maps

Maps reappear throughout Lost Children Archive, beckoning the reader to examine the different “routes” we follow in our day-to-day lives, as well as different ways of being or feeling lost.

In the beginning of the novel, the narrator describes the imaginary “map” of their family’s lives in New York City as a web of routes to familiar places—“school, work, errands, appointments, meetings, bookstore, corner deli, notary public, doctor’s office” (38)—with their shared apartment as the center of the web. The narrator starts to feel spiritually “lost” when her husband’s soundscape project takes them away from the center of this web, following a straight route on a road map to Arizona. She significantly insists on having the physical map as their sole guiding text, explaining that she resents GPS because it put her friend’s father’s paper map store out of business. Because she insists on using only the road map, she frequently gets lost (which augments her spiritual sense of lostness).

The mother’s map of the desert—which she keeps in her archive box—tellingly inspires the boy and girl to become “lost children” and search for the two Xs (which the boy believes to be Manuela’s daughters). The boy also draws his own ludicrously oversimplified map based on what he believes he sees in his mother’s map. Thus, the novel suggests a certain wishful desire behind map-making and route-following. By simply drawing up or following a map, we naively believe we will find what we’re looking for. The physical realities of space—and the experience of space—however, are often more overwhelming than our wishful imaginary maps anticipate.

Photographs

Throughout Lost Children Archive, Luiselli uses the boy’s Polaroid camera—and his photo documentation of the trip—as a vehicle for examining the complex memories, emotions, and experiences photographs capture (or fail to capture). Early on in the trip, his pictures turn out white-washed from the sun, and the mother jokes that he’s photographing ghosts that aren’t really there. Because photos are the result of light bouncing—“echoing”—off surfaces, she suggests that there’s nothing there to bounce off of. So doing, she leads the reader to think about what a photograph is made of and what a successful image contains.

Tellingly, even when the camera begins to take visible photographs, both the boy and the mother feel a strange disconnect from them, as though the things in the photos aren’t real, as when the mother narrator test the camera by taking a photo of her husband and son together and muses that the photo has an ethereal quality, like they aren’t really there. Her interpretation of this image—what she sees within it—“echoes” her emotional state: her feelings of impending separation from her husband and son. The boy experiences a similar emotional reaction when he looks at the photo he took of the plane the “lost children” were deported on; however, he comes to realize that the value of photos isn’t in what the images contain, but the ways they trigger memories of what happened “before” and “after” they were was taken. He reflects, “[…] everything that happened after I took the picture was also inside it, even though no one could see it” (200). Thus, the boy’s archived collection of Polaroids becomes a document to help remind his sister of their journey together, of everything they shared “before” and “after” the moment of each photograph.

Echoes

The concept of echoes is employed repeatedly and fluidly throughout Lost Children Archive. Sometimes, the term “echo” is used figuratively, as when the mother narrator alludes to the archive as a valley of echoes “in which your thoughts can bounce back to you, transformed” (42). She also begins to observe the ways in which present-day dialogues surrounding migration echo historic dialogues around the Mexican-American War and Indian Removal Act. The children echo the stories of migrant “lost children” they hear on the radio by roleplaying as “lost children" (and the mother narrator herself “echoes” these narratives by reading the Elegies aloud and recording them).

In a more literal sense, the father’s “Inventory of Echoes” soundscape seeks to capture echoes of Apaches now absent from Apacheria, “making [them] audible, despite their current absence, by sampling any echoes that still reverberate of them.” The mother narrator elaborates, “The inventory of echoes was […] one of sounds that were present in the time of recording and that, when we listen to them, remind us of the ones that are lost” (141). The children build upon this fascination with echoes when they become obsessed with the David Bowie song “Space Oddity” and play a game in which they not only echo the lyrics, but also echo phrases back and forth to one another through imaginary walkie-talkies. Most significantly, the family repeatedly convenes around Echo Canyon, first visiting as a family, then rediscovering one another there after the children are lost in the desert. In the second half of the novel, Echo Canyon becomes a kind of replacement hub for the family, in the absence of the former hub of their New York City apartment.