47 pages • 1 hour read
M.L. StedmanThe Light Between Oceans
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2012A 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
Grief and Loss
Every character in The Light Between Oceans grieves the loss of a loved one, and this loss both compels and justifies his or her actions. The experience of loss colors different characters’ perspectives, leading sometimes to empathy and compassion and sometimes to anger.
Tom’s experiences with war enable him to understand the effects of grief and loss. Early on, grief and loss are described as forces as powerful as war that can drive people to desperate measures. Reflecting on how the despair of losing his wife destroyed his predecessor, Trimble, Tom realizes that it doesn’t “take a war to push you over that edge” (55).
Partageuse is a city that has lost many of its men to the war, which allows its citizens to overlook certain behaviors, such as the mob that drove Frank Roennfeldt to flee with his infant daughter. On Janus Rock, Isabel’s loss of three pregnancies enables her to justify her decision to keep Lucy and overrule any doubts that it is the morally right thing to do; her experiences with loss lead her to believe that she may deserve the joy that the baby brings when she washes ashore. Isabel believes that Lucy is a gift from God, a gift that she deserves because of the grief she has suffered. Having lost two sons to war, Isabel’s parents are even more intensely grateful for the arrival of Lucy. Having been touched personally by the loss of his wife, Septimus Potts also feels deep compassion for his daughter, Hannah, and a special desire to see that someone suffers for causing her such pain.
The Difference Between Right and Wrong
The theme of right and wrong is summarized by the character of Ralph, who says: “Right and wrong can be like bloody snakes: so tangled up that you can’t tell which is which until you’ve shot ’em both, and then it’s too late” (215). Throughout the book, characters struggle to see right and wrong clearly. As Tom and Isabel become further entrenched in their choice to keep a baby that does not belong to them, the argument regarding their decision to keep Lucy intensifies in complexity.
While the horrors of the First World War have given the town of Partageuse a different understanding of right and wrong, the war seems to have focused Tom’s mind. The townspeople, all having suffered loss in their lives, seem empathetic, knowing what grief can drive people to do. They look out for each other, and sometimes look away from wrongdoing. A man driven by his strong moral code, Tom understands that many men have come back from the war unable to tell the difference between right and wrong. He has chosen to escape to Janus Rock, where he feels that right and wrong will be clearer to him after the moral ambiguities he faced in battle.
To Isabel, who suffers her greatest grief on Janus, her existence on the island becomes an opportunity to create her own sense of right and wrong, a personal code of ethics she later uses to justify her actions. She feels that she deserves to keep Lucy, after what God has put her through. Isabel’s choice and Tom’s decision to support Isabel result in a situation that challenges the tolerant attitudes of Partageuse. Though the town of Partageuse has not faced such a predicament before, no one is eager to judge Tom. Even those characters who are directly hurt by Tom and Isabel’s choice to keep Lucy express complicated feelings, sometimes feeling anger and a desire for justice and other times feeling empathetic and forgiving.
Fate and Free Will
Throughout the novel, the forces of fate and free will intersect to complicate the lives of different characters. Tossed about by fate, various characters lose loved ones and face the consequences: Isabel loses her brothers to the violence of war, Tom loses his innocence and his peace of mind, and Trimble loses his wife and his grip on reality. Later, on Janus Rock, Isabel loses her three pregnancies, through no fault of her own, and the loss of her dream of motherhood impacts the already wounded Isabel deeply. Death and violence, whether delivered by war or by nature, communicate to the characters affected by loss that they have little control over their lives.
Tom’s acceptance of nature and fate contrasts with Isabel’s willfulness and her choices to confront fate and to try to exert her free will on nature. Their perceptions of Janus Rock foreshadow the argument they have when the boat carrying the baby washes up on the shores of their remote island. Tom appreciates and accepts Janus Rock as a place where he must live by the rules of nature; Isabel, on the other hand, refuses to accept the course of nature. Her naming of the different parts of Janus Rock demonstrates her impulse to label nature according to her whims. Just as Isabel wants to place the various places she observes on Janus Rock into tidy categories with names, so she tries to manage her experience of motherhood according to her own desires. Nature has determined that Isabel will be childless, but she insists that she will be a mother when the infant Lucy arrives; ultimately, however, Isabel must return Lucy to her mother and submit to her fate.
