45 pages • 1 hour read
Helena FoxHow It Feels To Float
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2019A 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
Photography
Photography is a motif in the novel that charts Biz’s progress toward acceptance and recovery. As part of Bridgit’s therapy, she suggests that Biz join a gym or take a community college class. Biz decides to take a photography class, largely because it will give her a chance to feel close to her father, as she can use his bulky old camera. The novel reveals that photography plays an important role in Biz’s recovery; as Biz takes photos of the world around her, they begin to tell her their stories, allowing her to connect to people, places, and objects in the outside world. Although Biz’s medication ultimately makes the photos stop talking to her, her practice of photography and her communication with the photos is an important first step in her reestablishing a connection with life.
Photography helps Biz understand the difference between the present and the past. When she looks at her family photos, hoping to discover something more about her roots, Biz finds those pictures are silent. One the other hand, the images she takes of her neighborhood tell her their stories, and she begins to understand that she can take an active interest in the world around her. The photographic process is symbolic for Biz; capturing the world through her lens allows her to maintain a safe distance and at the same time connect intimately with her surroundings. Developing the photos by dipping the negatives into the solution tray and watching the images slowly reveal themselves is a metaphor for Biz’s world coming back into focus.
Finally, Photography helps Biz understand presence and acceptance: “Here I am. Here are voices, ribboning out from rectangles of paper. Om” (133), the last word is an echo of the Hindu mantra for taking satisfaction in the moment.
The Ocean
Bodies of water—swimming pools, creeks, rivers, and the ocean—symbolize Biz’s emotional growth and her recovery.
Initially, water is associated calm and refuge. As Biz stares out at the Pacific, she is comforted by the idea of immersing herself in its churning waves, escaping the emotional chaos of her world: “I stand at the edge of the water. I look out at the white of the waves and the dark of the ocean. I imagine all the sleepy fish. I imagine how warm they must be. The water’s at my ankles and it is warm; those fish aren’t wrong” (43). However, Biz cannot take refuge in the ocean, and her draw to it equates with self-annihilation, an impulse she battles throughout the narrative. Water provides the context of her father and grandfather’s deaths, so water also represent loss, grief, and emotional instability.
By contrast, When Jasper and Biz frolic about the ocean together, the ocean emerges as a force of life and joy. She no longer floats above the water or wants to submerge herself below it. Biz feels at one with the molecules of the ocean: “When we reach the see-through curl of the first big wave, we both dive—under water, into water, becoming water” (225). In this case, Biz merges with the ocean in life, not in death.
Sliding Doors
This novel makes many allusions to works of literature, film, music, and art. Among them are Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, sculptor Alexander Calder, the music of Rage Against the Machine, the e. e. cummings poem “Buffalo Bill’s,” the sci-fi parable Watership Down, The Beatles’ White Album, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. One allusion, however, becomes particularly important to Biz’s recovery: the 1998 film Sliding Doors.
The premise of the film reveals Biz’s psychological mindset. In the film, Gwyneth Paltrow plays Helen Quilley, a woman who is hurrying to catch a train. The movie follows two entirely different life stories for the character: one if she makes the train, the other if she misses the train. The idea of “[t]he universe split in two” (28) appeals to Biz, as she also feels pulled between worlds.
For Biz, the film offers a symbol of her own life. She feels as if she is living and not living her life, that she is her own alter ego, always watching what happens to the “other” Biz. That sense of dislocation is suggested in the movie as it shifts from one version of Helen to the other. Each life unfolds with its own purpose and meaning. This is how Biz feels as she moves through the crowded halls of her high school: “I feel like I’m seeing the scene from somewhere else. In front of a screen maybe, watching someone else’s life” (17). It is as if she were her own twin (she finds her younger twin brothers infinitely fascinating), able to live and able to stand apart from living. Until her series of epiphanies in Temora, when she learns the family secrets about her father and grandfather, Biz exists apart from her own life, what she calls her “opposite, matterless self” (15). She watches from the safety of emotional distance as her own life unfolds. It is only in the closing section that Biz rejects the premise of Sliding Doors and becomes one with her life.
Floating
Biz compares her ability to separate herself from painful memories and emotions to the calm feeling of floating; she imagines herself far away from the difficulty, floating on top of it as if she were on water. After she becomes victim of The Posse’s vicious rumors, for instance, Biz decides simply not to go to school. She stays in bed and feels as if she is there and not there. “I am going to lie here for the entire day, floating. I will sleep and get up only to pee…I will spend autumn and winter here and come out with the spring. If I come out” (64).
That last sentence reveals the dangers of floating. In floating, Biz avoids actually dealing with her traumatic past, the death of her father, and her complicated questions about her identity. Floating is her mind’s defense mechanism, a way to keep retraumatizing thoughts and feelings at bay. Biz attempts on numerous occasions to describe the sensation: “thinking about floating, thinking about water, thinking about being on the way, when something flicks inside me—OFF to ON, or would it be ON to OFF—and I leave my body and turn molecular” (113). In becoming one with water, at least in her mind, Biz finds a way to dissolve her sense of loss and her own anxieties over her vulnerability.
Bridgit, Biz’s clinical psychologist, assures Biz that what she is undergoing is called dissociative disorder, and it is way for the mind to protect itself from being overwhelmed by trauma. But she cautions Biz that such involuntary escapes—Biz does not will herself to float but cannot resist the feeling—interferes with her ability to interface with day-to-day reality. The sensation of floating creates discontinuity as Biz comes to rely on escaping. The danger is suggested by Biz’s own father who is often associated with a surfboard, symbolic of his need to stay above the water, as it were. In the end, that need to escape drives her father to his death, but with help from family and friends, Biz learns to engage with her emotions and reality of life after losing a loved one.
