Summary
The Goldfinch is narrated by Theodore "Theo" Decker at different points in his life. He begins the story in Amsterdam, sheltered in a hotel room for reasons not yet disclosed. Theo is a 27-year-old American man whose story is in the Dutch papers, but the reasoning is provided in Dutch: "Onopgeloste moord. Onbekende...Een Amerikaan met een strafblad," which translates to: Unsolved murder. Missing person. An American with a criminal record. Theo does not know Dutch, and even though the papers don't show his picture, he isn't sure if they contain his name or his description. He is plagued by anxious, vivid dreams, the strangest of which is about his mother, Audrey. In the dream, he is in Hobie's shop, standing at a mirror, when his mother appears in the mirror behind him. He knows he cannot turn around, so he stays in place until a vapor rolls between them and he wakes up.
In reality, Theo's mother is dead, and he sees her death as a "before and after" in his life. His mother was the person that made him feel most loved, and he remembers her theatrical charm, beauty, and quickness. He was 13 when she died, and he feels responsible for her death.
On the day she died, Theo and Audrey stand outside waiting for a taxi to take them to a conference at his school after he has been suspended. Theo's dad left the family without a forwarding address, and Theo's teachers have given him endless extensions and allowances out of pity, leading him into "a hole." He isn't sure why he's been suspended, but he suspects a teacher caught him smoking on school property. Theo is also worried that he's been caught sneaking into vacation houses in the Hamptons with his classmate Tom Cable. Tom reassures him that no one knows about their breaking and entering, but Theo isn't completely convinced.
Theo and his mom set off from the Upper West Side, and his mom refuses to take an umbrella from their doorman before getting into the taxi. In the taxi, Theo's mother starts to get carsick, and asks to get out on Fifth Avenue. As they walk over to Theo's school, it starts to rain, and Theo's mother, an art lover and former art history major, leads him into the Metropolitan Museum of Art to dry off and escape the downpour.
Theo loves the museum because of its size, immense in comparison to their small New York apartment, and he often goes there to roam the maze of galleries. Theo's mother leads them to an exhibit on the masterworks of the Dutch Golden Age, where she wants to see The Goldfinch, a painting that she spent hours staring at as a kid.
After he spots a girl that he's interested in, he has trouble focusing on his mother's explanations and analyses of the paintings in the show. The girl he sees is holding a flute case and standing near an older man that might be her grandfather. Theo keeps looking at her as his mother describes The Goldfinch. The painting's brightness and compactness remind Theo of his mother in a childhood picture of hers.
His mother tells him that Fabritius, the painter of The Goldfinch, died after a gunpowder factory exploded near his home and destroyed most of his paintings. As his mother continues to discuss the painting, Theo notices the girl and her grandfather approach them, and the girl asks her grandfather if the goldfinch, which is shackled, lived its entire life in chains. The girl looks over at him, and keeps glancing back as her grandfather leads her away.
Theo obsesses over her, trying to figure out why she is at the museum and who she is. This obsession with people and their inner workings is part of what motivates him to break into houses with Tom. His mother turns to him as he's trying to figure the girl out and says it's time for them to head to their meeting with the principal. Before they leave, she wants to see The Anatomy Lesson one more time, and he decides to stay behind so he can talk to the girl. But, just as his mother walks away, the girl's grandfather drags her away. Theo starts to move towards her when a giant blast knocks him out.
When he finally comes to, he sees the wreckage of the bombed museum. He finds a badly burned man that cries out to him, and realizes it is the old man asking for the girl, whose name is Pippa. The man thinks Theo is someone else, and in his delirium points to The Goldfinch and asks Theo to take it. Theo goes to look for his mother, but stops to speak with the old man. The old man hands him a ring and tells him to go to Hobart & Blackwell and to ring the green bell before he dies in Theo's arms.
After he hears a phone ringing in the distance, Theo makes his way through the gallery and crawls through a space that leads him to a gallery filled with dead bodies. He takes in the scene and ends up running through the rooms of the museum trying to find an exit. After prying open a door that leads into the museum offices, he finds an exit and runs out into Central Park. As he makes his way through the crowd and tries to tell paramedics and police officers to go back into the building and save the people there, he is shoved out of the way.
When Theo isn't able to find his mother, he makes his way back home, telling himself that she will meet him there.
Analysis
In the novel, Theo Decker retells the past decade of his life, starting with the day his mother died. He is the first-person narrator of this bildungsroman—a coming-of-age tale, of the kind that one often finds in the works of Charles Dickens. Tartt's heavy use of description, metaphor, first-person narration, dramatic irony, and lively action is intended to engage the reader and explore the inner motivations, struggles, and traumas of the characters from Theo's perspective.
The narration begins with Theo in a small room in a foreign city. This foreshadows his confinement by outside forces, a recurring motif in the novel. The story begins in medias res, or in the middle of the action, before going back in time to the day his mother dies. At first, it is unclear who the narrator is, or why he is anxiously hiding away in a hotel room—though it becomes clear from translating the Dutch headlines that he has murdered someone and is an American with a criminal past of some kind. This uncertainty creates a very specific mood: Theo is a sympathetic narrator due to his mother's death, but it is unclear what exactly he has done, adding a sense of mystery to his seclusion. Theo's tone is anxious and afraid as his heart "scramble[s] and flounder[s]." By starting the novel in a kind of flash-forward, Tartt creates a mood of confinement and dread.
Foreshadowing is critical throughout the novel, and Theo creates dramatic irony by telling the reader his mother will die before he explains the circumstances surrounding her death. He begins describing the day of his mother's death ominously, explaining that it is "unmarked, swallowed without a trace" (9). He claims that he is trying to avoid "a shadow gliding in overhead," instead saying he was "blind and deaf to the future," which creates tension between the foreshadowing his narration provides and his perception of reality on the day of his mother's death and throughout the novel.
The first chapter also establishes the importance of Theo's mother to him. He describes her in minute detail, and also describes the recurrent thoughts and memories he has of her and of their last days together. He remembers his mother at a restaurant noticing a birthday dinner across from them, and acknowledges that he wouldn't remember this if she hadn't died soon after. He also recalls her in meticulous detail, and describes her style, her scent, and her movements. Her decision to take him to the painting makes him ascribe immense value to it, and the painting becomes even more significant when the old man tells him to take it.
Guilt is established as an important theme early in the novel. After his mother's death, Theo remarks that "everything that's happened to me since then is thoroughly my own fault" but also says that he has "lost sight" of anything that could have led him to a happier life (8). He continues to refer to her death as his fault throughout the novel, and he numbs his pain in various self-destructive ways. The painting becomes a symbol for the guilt and pain of the loss of his mother. It also symbolizes the burden of her death that he is forced to carry with him, and the trauma of the explosion that he carries with him.
