Moon Tiger

Moon Tiger is a frame story. In the primary narrative, the elderly Claudia is dying in a hospital bed, writing the history of her life inside her mind. This structure is introduced at the outset of Chapter 1, as the novel opens with Claudia speaking to her nurse about “writing a history of the world” (1). Unlike some frame stories in which the framing narrative occurs only at the introduction and conclusion of the novel, Moon Tiger’s structure dips in and out of the frame story. In a stream-of-consciousness fashion, the reader catches glimpses of Claudia in the hospital interspersed with episodes from her life and her musings on wider history.

The narrative introduces the theme of The Intersection of Personal and Global Histories as Claudia contemplates writing her “history of the world.” In reality, Claudia’s history is mostly a personal one, as she uses her historian’s training and education to inform her own story. This tension between personal and global history is established in the early chapters of the novel and continues to develop as Claudia’s story further unfolds. This tension also serves to characterize Claudia as someone who longs to understand her place in history. Claudia’s intellectual curiosity, disregard for convention, and her egotism are all underscored by her conceptualizing of her personal history as a global one.

The novel’s opening demonstrates how Lively uses her novel’s structure to situate her writing within postmodernism. The episodes from Claudia’s past are not exclusively flashbacks, because they are narrated from multiple perspectives; the writing shifts between Claudia’s first-person narration and omniscient narration that dips into the perspectives of other characters. Chapters 1-3 thus introduce a pattern that will persist for the length of the novel: Claudia recalls a memory from her perspective, and then the narrative shifts to show that same event from other central characters’ perspectives as well. This inclusion of multiple perspectives, in particular the small discrepancies that exist between the characters’ recollections, highlights the theme of The Subjective Nature of Memory. As each iteration of each memory unfolds, characters remember what they said and did differently from how others remember it. The novel asserts that the most accurate version is derived from taking all these versions into account together.

Chapters 1-3 introduce many of the secondary characters who play important roles in Claudia’s story. This includes Jasper, Gordon, and Sylvia, all of whom have sections narrated from their perspectives in these early chapters. In the first three chapters, Claudia also refers multiple times to an important person who remains yet unnamed. This is Tom, though readers will not be introduced to him until Chapter 6. The emphasis on the roles that these other characters have played in Claudia’s story underscores the theme of The Impact of Relationships on Self-Identity. As she lies on her deathbed, Claudia cannot recount the story of her own life without thinking hard and often about her family and friends and the way they influenced her choices.

Claudia’s brother, Gordon, is one of the characters with the strongest and most lasting influence on her story. Gordon is the first character to be named in the novel, aside from Claudia herself. Chapter 2 introduces Gordon’s wife, Sylvia, in a tense and uncomfortable scene that foreshadows Claudia’s affair with her brother through Sylvia’s observations about their intimacy and the currents of passion and anger that flow between them. This scene is an important moment of characterization for Gordon; the reader observes how similar Gordon and Claudia are and how jealous Gordon is of Claudia’s date, Jasper.

Notably, the first memory scene in the novel, which depicts Claudia and Gordon as children searching for ammonites, establishes Ammonites as an important symbol that will reoccur throughout the novel. The ammonites, fossils of marine shellfish, look like spirals in the slate-blue rock of the cliffside and fascinate young Claudia. As fossils, the ammonites represent deep time and the recording of lives long past. Claudia’s fascination with them is an early manifestation of her interest in history. Her willingness to compete against Gordon to find the fossils also represents her later aggressive insistence that she be allowed to participate in the male-dominated fields of history and journalism.