65 pages • 2 hours read
Tahereh MafiUnravel Me
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2013A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Bird
The bird that Juliette dreams about—which matches a tattoo on Adam’s chest—shifts its symbolic meaning as Juliette increases her control over her powers and continues her journey of self-acceptance. In the early pages of the novel, Juliette reflects on how the bird gave her hope when she was trapped in the psychiatric facility: “[The bird] used to meet me in my dreams, flying strong and smooth, sailing over the world like it new better, […] like it was leading me somewhere safe. It was my one piece of hope in the bitter darkness of the asylum” (29).
When Juliette was trapped, the bird, able to fly away, symbolized hope. As her circumstances improve, and Juliette begins to realize that she is still affected by the isolation she experienced in the psychiatric facility, she begins to see the bird as a haunting symbol of being fixed in place: “It’s frozen. Flapping its wings in place like it’s been caught in an invisible cage, […]. It looks as if it’s free to soar through the skies. But it’s stuck” (29). In this image, the bird represents the appearance of freedom; Juliette is not literally incarcerated anymore—she may seem free—but she hasn’t yet managed to entirely free herself from the trauma of her imprisonment.
As Juliette begins to take charge of her own life, however, the symbol of the bird shifts again. When Warner kisses her in her Omega Point bedroom, Juliette thinks, “he’s holding me like I’m made of feathers. He’s holding my face and looking at his own hands like he can’t believe he’s caught this bird who’s always so desperate to fly away” (340). The emphasis on feathers in this description signifies softness, emotional vulnerability, and care. The bird still represents Juliette, and she is able to fly away, yet she chooses not to. This makes her feel precious to Warner, a concept that both frightens and thrills Juliette.
Counting and Numbers
To control her spiraling emotions, Juliette exhibits arithmomania, or obsession with numbers. This tendency is even more evident in Shatter Me, and Juliette’s reliance on numbers to make sense of things is portrayed as both an element of her personality that isn’t necessarily maladaptive and as a coping strategy that becomes less and less essential as her mental health improves.
In the beginning of the novel, Juliette uses counting to deal with even minor stressors. When she walks through the Omega Point cafeteria, nervous about making new friends, she thinks, “6 steps forward. 15 tables to pass. 42 43 44 seconds and counting” (31). This relatively low-stakes situation (compared to the war that’s brewing) triggers considerable anxiety in Juliette, whose long experience with isolation has left her not knowing how to interact with others.
In the first half of the novel, she continues to use counting to deal with the trauma of hurting Adam with her lethal touch powers though she recognizes the limits of this coping strategy in the face of massive upset: “I count everything […] There are never enough numbers” (92). As circumstances become more complex for Juliette, and she learns to involve herself more in situations beyond her own problems, counting becomes less effective. Kenji reminds Juliette that her tendency toward counting actually distracts her from what is important: “Stop crying,” he tells her. “Stop sitting in the dark counting out all your individual feelings about how sad and lonely you are” (130). This is a turning point in Juliette’s character arc, in which counting has become counterproductive to her engagement with people and events outside of herself.
The Reestablishment’s penchant for exact numbers further develops the symbolism of counting as a strategy for control. Kenji explains: “The Reestablishment has some crazy fascination with exact numbers. 3,333 sectors altogether and 555 sectors each. Everything gets the same thing, regardless of size. They think it shows how equally they’ve divided everything, but it’s just a bunch of bullshit” (164). The Reestablishment thus uses numbers to make things seem equal as a tool for actually furthering inequality. This highlights the novel’s political message of the danger of governments reducing people to statistics rather than seeing them as individuals with complex wants and needs.
Grammatical Structures
Much of the narration of Unravel Me takes place within Juliette’s thoughts. As someone who spent many of her formative years in a psychiatric facility, Juliette struggles to communicate effectively with her newfound friends. Yet, as an avid reader during her childhood, Juliette uses the terms of grammar to explain the convoluted nature of her thoughts. When she thinks on her difficulties befriending Sonya and Sara, for example, Juliette thinks, “I don’t have a closet filled with umms and ellipses ready to insert at the beginnings and ends of sentences. I don’t know how to be a verb, an adverb, any kind of modifier. I’m a noun through and through” (69). As a metaphor about friendship, this passage makes two assumptions about grammar. First, by saying she lacks “umms and ellipses,” Juliette suggests that informal (or impromptu) manners of speaking are essential to the emotional intimacy of a friendship. For Juliette, who struggles with repetitive thought cycles, speaking “off the cuff” is challenging. Second, she frames nouns as static and simpler than verbs, adjectives, or modifiers, all of which add nuance or activity to a sentence. Juliette thus shows that she sees herself, at this point in the text, as someone prone to black and white thinking and incapable of decisive action.
Juliette also uses the terms of grammar to show emotional reactions. When Warner asks her to release him from Omega Point, Juliette thinks: “I’m checking my pockets for spare words and sentences but I’m finding none, not an adverb, not a preposition or even a dangling participle because there doesn’t exist a single response to such an outlandish request” (240). There is some irony to her claim here; even as Juliette thinks that she cannot find a single “spare word,” she clearly has a number of grammatical terms through which she can describe her shock.
This tendency to ruminate on parts of speech instead of producing words in real-time conversation signifies Juliette’s fear of rejection after making a mistake. Unlike other people, Juliette risks fatally injuring someone with the tiniest slip-up. She has forced herself to refrain from spontaneous actions of any kind, and this includes speech acts. When she does respond in the moment, such as when she is kissing Adam or when she sees the carnage during The Reestablishment’s attack, i.e., “Dead dead dead is everywhere” (367), her grammar suffers, and she repeats words, often using incorrect speech. Over time, becomes more comfortable with spontaneous communication but continues to filter communication through the metacontext of grammar.
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By Tahereh Mafi
