Nail File
The breathlessly creepy opening chapter ends with the narrator trapped inside her bedroom by a burglar who has ransacked both her home and her psyche. Before leaving, he commits one final atrocity upon her state of mind by removing the spindle which allows the knob to open the door. Her reaction to this is the patience to exercise two hours batting away at the latch with a nail file trying to free herself. Coming in just the second chapter of the story as it does, the event is transformed into a symbol of the character’s persistence and resourcefulness, both of which will be further tested.
A Cruise Ship Turning Around
Cruise ships rarely turn around. No matter how significant or influential a passenger may be, once it leaves port the chances of coming back to the same place is one of the rarest sights in modern society. It is this truism of the industry that makes what the narrator sees toward end of the book symbolic. She is on shore by now and watching as the lights of the ship relentlessly head toward the horizon’s point where they will disappear. It is just at that moment that—astonishingly—the lights begin moving in a direction and eventually become bigger and brighter. This sight becomes not the first, but the pre-eminent symbolic display of power of one very dangerous character.
The Whodunnit Web Forum
At one point, the first-person narration gives way to a messages posted by users on an internet forum for “armchair detectives” who are discussing the disappearance of the narrator in connection with the discovery of a body found floating in the water. The messages back and forth are mixture of speculation, attacks, defenses and, surprise, insults tossed at each other. The posts stand in direct contrast to the narrator’s career: journalism. This juxtaposition allows the very brief section to be see symbolically as an attack upon the conflation of internet rumormongering with genuine journalism; a conflation that more and more people are being urged to make by powerful interests (maybe even a few capable of getting a cruise ship to turn around).
The Ocean
The ocean takes on several symbolic properties in the book. At one point, the narrator (ironically to just about anyone else on earth besides her) situates the middle of the ocean as the safest place on the planet that she could possibly find. The events which unfold on the ship definitely undermine this contention, thereby turning the ocean into a sinister place of secrets and lies, death and the abyss. One element does tie both these perspectives together, however. Whether the ocean represents safety or menace, it gains that power from the isolation and alienation it provides.
The Northern Lights
The cruise ship is named Aurora, and its mission is to take tourists into the Norwegian fjords for a spectacular view of the aurora borealis. As one influential gentleman puts it in leading a toast among the guests, “The aurora borealis is something that everyone should see before they die.” Just before she reaches the conclusion of her story, the narrator finally does see the eerie light show in the sky and by then they have become, somewhat ironically, a symbol of life and survival.
