The House in the Cerulean Sea

Klune uses color and the lack of it to emphasize emotional states. The earliest significant use is Linus’s “don’t you wish you were here?” mousepad, which provides a small square of vivid color that interrupts his otherwise gray, miserable existence. Linus longs for color, as is evidenced by the beach scene and by the sunflowers he’s planted outside of his home, which he describes to Phee as “a bit of color in all the gray of steel and rain” (194). The gray of Linus’s city environment echoes the dreary, colorless misery of his day-to-day life. Once he escapes it and breaks through the rain and into the countryside, his life is full of marvelous color.

The color orange also plays a key role in the novel. In his dreary city life, Linus feels obliged to apologize for a faint orange stain on his shirt—a minor but noteworthy sign of deviance in an environment driven by staid rules and strict regulations. On Marsyas, that same color appears to indicate that Arthur is present and that he is a magical being himself, even before Linus learns this to be true.

The color of the island is a metaphor for the joylessness of Linus’s city life. When observing Phee and Zoe working with the flowers, Linus thinks to himself “how muted his sunflowers must seem in comparison. He didn’t know how he’d ever thought they were bright. Going home was going to be quite the shock” (188). Once he’s returned to his normal life, the colorlessness becomes unbearable. He sluggishly drags himself through his days, during which, “it was always raining. The sky was always metal gray” (364). His return journey to Marsyas is characterized by the appearance of color, symbolically paralleling his return to a place full of joy and life.