The Elevator (Symbol)
The elevator in which Long Way Down takes place is a symbol of the restrictions Will feels as he tries to right the wrong of his brother's death. When he sets out to kill Riggs, Shawn's assumed killer, Will takes the elevator down from his eighth-floor apartment to the lobby. The elevator moves impossibly slowly, giving Will ample time to speak between every floor with another ghost of someone killed because of gun violence. Throughout this experience, Will insists upon his duty to abide by "The Rules" and kill the man who killed his brother. Just as Will believes he must live out a tragic fate similar to those of the ghosts he speaks with, the elevator moves only between set points, confining its occupants until it delivers them to a selected floor. As the story progresses and more of Will's uncertainty and fear emerge, the reader understands Will is just as trapped by The Rules as he is by the elevator.
The Rules (Symbol)
The Rules that Will cites throughout Long Way Down represent an inadequate response to grief and violence. The Rules are simple: When someone dies, you must not cry, you must not snitch to the police, and you must get revenge by killing the person who killed your loved one. In this way, The Rules encourage emotional repression, distrust of the police, and perpetuation of violence. Will learns The Rules from his older brother, who learned them from their father and their uncle, who learned them from their father and grandfather. Ultimately, The Rules have been passed down out of a need to address ongoing violence in circumstances where official channels of justice are prejudiced against marginalized people.
Shawn's Gun (Symbol)
The handgun Will finds in Shawn's drawer is a symbol of violence bringing about further violence. Upon Shawn's death, Will goes to the middle drawer of his dresser and withdraws the pistol he knows Shawn keeps there. Will takes the handgun with him the next morning when he sets out to kill Riggs, the man he believes shot Shawn. In the elevator down, Will learns from the ghost of Shawn's mentor, Buck, that the gun once belonged to Buck. He also learns that Shawn used the gun to kill Frick, the man Shawn mistakenly believed shot Buck. In this way, Reynolds shows how the handgun has been a tool for vengeance that has only brought about more needless deaths.
Anagrams (Motif)
Throughout the novel, Will mentions words formed by rearranging the letters of another. His list of anagrams includes scare/cares, canoe/ocean, alive/a veil, feel/flee, cool/loco, and cinema/iceman. When explaining his gift for thinking of anagrams, Will says: "Same letters, different words, somehow still make sense together, like brothers." In this way, the motif can be understood as Will's subconscious need to understand how he is like an anagram counterpart to his older brother—a different yet complementary combination of the same DNA. Ultimately, the motif resolves with Will wishing he could think of an anagram for the word "poser," a coded admission that he is merely pretending to be a gangster and in reality does not know whether he is capable of avenging Shawn's death.
Yellow Tape (Symbol)
The yellow caution tape the police put up around crime scenes in Will's neighborhood is a symbol for the community's resigned attitude toward violence. When narrating the events that led to Uncle Mark's death, Will's father notes how any witnesses to the shooting "pretended like yellow tape was some kind of neighborhood flag that don't nobody wave but always be flapping in the wind." In this passage, Reynolds underscores how people in the neighborhood are so used to yellow police tape that it may as well be the flag under which the community unites. The symbol also arises when Will explains that the children in his building "play mummy" with yellow tape the morning after Shawn's murder because no one stops them from disturbing yet another crime scene that has sprung up in the place they play.
