84 pages • 2 hours read
Tommy OrangeThere There
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Symbols & Motifs
Feathers
Feathers are a crucial recurrent image in There There. Although they primarily appear in relation to regalia, the formal dress for powwow dancing, feathers specifically signal moments of heightened emotion and Indigenous identity. For example, as Orvil prepares to dance for the first time in the locker room, he looks around at the older men who are also getting ready. Orvil notes that “they all needed to dress up to look Indian too. There’s something like the shaking of feathers he felt somewhere between his heart and his stomach” (232). As a young Indigenous man who feels somewhat disconnected from his heritage, Orvil is reassured by understanding that these men also need to “dress up to look Indian.” The “shaking of feathers” inside him implies that Orvil has some deeper connection or internalization of his identity because of this experience. His feathers are his Indigenous identity.
Later, as Orvil lies on the grass bleeding from his bullet wound, he “wants to stand up, to fly away in all his bloodied feathers” (271). This impulse to fly is only possible because of the feathers he wears. For Orvil, like other characters, wearing his feathered regalia allows him to transcend any of his limitations—the feathers both define him and make it possible for him to escape.
Spiders and Spider Legs
Spiders appear frequently in the novel. While they are sometimes associated with the trickster spider, Veho—also a term for white man—they too represent a character’s transition from weakness to strength. Orvil’s discovery of three spider legs in his leg immediately precedes his first dance at the powwow. Similarly, when Opal was young, she “pulled three spider legs out of her leg” the day before she and Jacquie left the home where Opal defended her sister from Ronald’s predation (165). Both Opal and Orvil perform an act of enormous courage after they pull spider legs out of their legs.
Opal also reflects on what her mother taught her about spiders: that “spiders carry miles of web in their bodies, miles of story, miles of potential home and trap. She said that’s what we are. Home and trap” (163). Opal’s narrative reflects this duality: When she is young, she must escape the physical trap of her home, but later she makes a home for Jacquie’s three grandsons, revealing the positive “potential” inside her.
Reflections and Mirrors
From early on in the novel, characters describe their reflections and the ways they “look and don’t look” at other people (28). Some characters are more thoughtful about the idea of reflection, like Dene, who tells stories through his camera, and Tony, who constantly observes how people react to his physical appearance. Other characters are less aware until they have a more direct experience that prompts them to think about reflections. Opal, for example, watches Orvil powwow dancing and thinks that “he was just trying to act crazy in front of the mirror to prove no one else was in control but him, the Orvil on this side of the mirror” (160).
At one point, Dene points to the complexity of how people look at reflections externally, commenting that “projection as a concept is a slippery slope because everything could be projection” (147). All of these characters could be a “projection” of something else, yet to assume that is a “slippery slope.” As the characters look at themselves and think about their identity, Orange forces the readers to consider how they understand each character’s self.
