The Shell Collector

“The Shell Collector” is a short story that explores the interiority of its central character, the unnamed shell collector, as he grapples with his desire for solitude and attempts to make sense of the events of his life. The flashbacks that make up the bulk of this story reveal the shell collector’s complex relationship with the world around him—both the natural world and the greater community of people that fall in and out of his private sphere. From the first page, when we meet the shell collector in his life of solitude on a remote Kenyan island, his primary desire—to be left alone in his private world—seems to be at odds with everything that is asked of him. Flashbacks reveal that this is an ongoing struggle, as he sifts through his past in search of answers.

Though the shell collector feels a distinct Isolation From Humanity, his life seems to be marked by a series of violations of his wish for solitude, with each violation leading to the next. Early on in the story, he grasps for an explanation for this escalation, wondering where it began:

[M]aybe it started before Nancy, maybe it grew outward from the shell collector himself, the way a shell grows, spiraling upward from the inside, whorling around its inhabitant, all the while being worn down by the weathers of the sea (12).

This marks the start of the first flashback, moving all the way back to the shell collector’s childhood and what he believes may be the initial catalyst that set him on his current path. He continues to look to the spiraling growth of a cone shell in order to make sense of events that might otherwise be difficult to grapple with: his private world becoming the stuff of tabloids and the death of his son. Later, the same comparison is made again, this time with more crystalized analysis: “[T]here was this twist in his life, this spiral that was at once inevitable and unpredictable, like the aperture in a horn shell” (14). These twists and turns of life, in his view, cannot be controlled, altered, or prepared for. What’s more, with the early image of the shell worn down by the sea, it seems that there is a constant barrage of outside forces. In short, his life is completely and utterly out of his control.

While this telegraphs a sense of helplessness, the shell collector encounters a character with a different interpretation and outlook of these same events, serving as the perfect foil to underscore the shell collector’s view of the world: the mwadhini, whose role in the story highlights the theme of Fate Versus Happenstance. The mwadhini is a man of faith and therefore shares the shell collector’s view of life as inevitable. Like the shell collector, the mwadhini sees his own pattern, distinct as it may be from the motif of the shell:

And then today the doctor tells us of this American who was cured of the same disease by a snail. Such a simple cure. Elegant, would you not say? A snail that accomplishes what laboratory capsules cannot. Allah, we reason, must be involved in something so elegant. So you see. These are signs all around us. We must not ignore them (19).

With this belief in Allah’s guidance, the mwadhini follows a path laid out for him, while the shell collector can only look back to see the shape his life has taken.

Though the shell collector wants nothing more than to play the role of the hermit, everyone who washes up on his shore seems to require something more from him, leading him to feel a lack of control and also retreat further into isolation. When he says to the mwadhini, “I want only to be left alone” (21), there is a tone of desperation—a reaction to having his space intruded upon by strange men. But once he cures the mwadhini’s daughter, the intrusions escalate. In response, he hides away, trading the shores for inland paths, but this environment doesn’t offer the same sense of belonging: Thorns tear his shirt, bugs attack his body, and his cane collides with various obstacles. With time, even his understanding of the world around him begins to crumble: “He began to doubt his previous identifications: maybe the cone he had found in the path was not a cone at all, but a miter shell, or a rounded stone. Maybe it was an empty shell dropped by a villager. […] It was terrible not to know” (26). Left with so little refuge, he finally turns toward his son, Josh, and decides to help some of those whom he previously saw as nothing more than intruders.

As this story jumps from event to event, there are notable gaps in the narrative, not least of which is the month between the death of the shell collector’s son and the arrival of the American journalists. In setting two disparate moments in time side by side, the story asks the reader to interpret how these events impact one another. Though the shell collector always seemed to think of his son as a stranger, it is significant that after his death, he begins to reexamine his view of the world. “God writes next year’s plan for the world on this night” (34), he thinks one night, in a hashish-induced stupor. “He tried to picture God bent over parchment, dreaming, puzzling through the possibilities” (34). For once, near the story’s close, he becomes focused on the future as opposed to turning over the past. When he thinks he is dying from the venom of a cone snail, the narration remarks, “What he must have felt, what awful, frigid loneliness” (36). Though in the end of the story, his desire to be left alone to collect shells is not altogether transformed, he has come to terms with the true impact of isolation.