55 pages • 1 hour read
Jess LoureyUnspeakable Things
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A 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
Paper-Airplane Necklace
Content Warning: This novel refers to emotional, physical, and sexual abuse, as well as child neglect, murder, violence, racism, and anti-gay bias.
Gabriel is a genuinely kindhearted boy who is unconcerned with wealth. His kindness to Cass, such as his efforts to give her new mittens without being ostentatious about his display of generosity, inspires in her a profound infatuation. His paper-airplane necklace becomes a point of fixation for Cass and frequently appears throughout the text to signal both hope and devastation. For Gabriel, the necklace symbolizes ambition and hope for the future; he desires to be a pilot. For Cass, the necklace symbolizes love and hope for the future; she desires Gabriel.
As the adult narrator of the Prologue has already assured us, the airplane necklace will not have a happy ending. Repeated mentions of the necklace generate narrative tension; Cass has already indicated that obtaining it would mean extreme happiness, and yet reminders of the necklace’s eventual acquisition are met with the retrospective narrator’s tension, fear, and grief.
As a genuine sign of maturity, Cass offers Gabriel’s mother his necklace back. Acquiring the necklace was a fixture of many of Cass’s fantasies, but she learned that she should be careful what she wishes for.
Clicking Noise
One of the boys from the Hollow tells Cass that each boy who was attacked reported hearing a strange clicking sound during his assault. There are three contenders for the clicking noise, and Cass frequently vacillates between which sound-maker she thinks is culpable. Mr. Connelly’s clicks are associated with the sound of the metronome; as a music teacher, it makes sense that he would own one, but it does not make sense why he would carry it around with him as a very distinctive sort of signature during attacks. Sergeant Bauer’s clicks are associated with the clinking of his dog tags. Cass is haunted by the sound of these clinking together, since she realizes that she first heard this while watching him have sex at her parents’ org. Bauer is an intimidating and overly familiar man who is happy to abuse his authority and status as a cop. Goblin’s clicks are associated with an odd tic that he makes in the back of his throat.
The motif of the clicking noise is often employed as a red herring; frequently, when Cass is convinced that she knows who the attacker is, she immediately encounters a different source of clicks.
Pornotropic Gaze
The motif of the pornotropic gaze haunts the text. “Pornotroping” is a term used in feminist theory to describe the reduction of a person (usually a woman) to a mere flesh object. In “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book” (1987), Hortense Spillers coins this term to define the relationship between sexuality and slavery, demonstrating the intersectional parallels of the relationship between a straight man and a woman he believes he is entitled to and the relationship between an enslaver and an enslaved person. In attributing the gleeful and violent destruction of agency to a power-hungry figure who dehumanizes the Black woman’s body in order to exploit it, Spillers identifies the linkages between race, class, gender, and capitalism.
Cass and Sephie are frequent recipients of the pornotropic gaze; the gazes of nearly all the men and boys they interact with flatten them into objects. Objectified by their own father, they tiptoe around their house, protecting themselves behind locked doors and the vigilance of children being hunted by their father. Cass overhears her dad telling a friend that he would happily sell her to him, and she realizes that the sexual abuse he has already committed is not the worst thing he is capable of. Her drug-dealing, abusive dad is considering selling out his middle schooler because he views her as he views any woman: as someone designed for sex and male pleasure. Her dad views his daughters as objects for him and his friends to ogle, objectify, and exploit. He reminds them of their burgeoning sexuality at every opportunity. The objectifying gaze of the men and boys of the town highlights the Loss of Innocence inherent to The Darkness Lurking Beneath the Surface of Small-Town Life.
