55 pages • 1 hour read
Ann PancakeStrange as this Weather Has Been
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2007A 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
Personified Mountains
Throughout the novel, the mountains are described as having human characteristics because the people who live near them view the mountains as alive and capable of feeling loss and death. In Chapter 2, Bant compares the side of the mountain to a mutilated human body, describing it as “naked and scalped” (16) and essentially “dead” (20). Using gruesome, violent imagery and pairing it with anatomical words such as “head,” “body,” and “guts” make the argument that the mountains aren’t just being mined for coal, they’re being murdered: “I knew from Lace and Mogey that after they blasted the top off the mountain to get the coal, they had no place to put the mountain’s body except dump it in the head of the hollow. So there it loomed. Pure mountain guts” (20).
This kind of language is used again when Avery sees the butchered mountaintops for the first time. He talks about how the “trees have been slaughtered” (212) and how the water on the hills is “opaque as mustard and colored like the inside of a sick baby’s diaper” (213). To “slaughter” is to kill in a cruel way and implies that the trees are suffering, and describing the water in connection to a sick baby makes the argument that the water has become ill like a child because of what’s being done to it. However, most important to note from these descriptions is how the characters feel about the mountains, water, and landscape. By describing these natural elements in a human ways, characters show how deeply they care for them and believe in their inherent worth.
“The Monkey”
The dead animal stuck in the creek, referred to as “the monkey,” is symbolic of the death that looms over Yellowroot as increasingly more pieces of the land are butchered. The monkey is first introduced in Chapter 3 as an unidentifiable animal carcass that haunts the Make family’s sons with “blond curly knots of drowned hair on the twisted body and part of the creepy face. […] Corey has no idea, really, what this thing is. He knows it can’t be a monkey, yet that seems the best thing to call it” (29).
Whenever characters look at the monkey or think about it, they immediately feel a fear they cope with in variety of ways. Corey is afraid of the monkey, yet he “can’t help the staring. It’s like you can’t get your eyes to adjust, the thing won’t come into focus, but, no, not like the focus of your eyes, but your mind, your mind can’t focus it” (29). He can’t understand what the monkey is, and like the destruction that surrounds him, both the fear and the monkey draws Corey in.
Conversely, although Dane has never seen the monkey directly, he can envision it based on the stories that Corey and Tommy have told him. His fear stems from Mrs. Taylor’s End Times Bible stories, which he associates with the environmental destruction happening to Yellowroot, and the monkey exacerbates this fear. In Chapter 35, Dane sees a vision of the monkey at the end of the hall in the middle of the night: “Limp on the carpet, twisted funny unlike any living thing would lie, and its dirty fur swished a little” (337). He feels like it’s beckoning him to look at it, which is symbolic of how Dane wants to face his fear, but he can’t. He looks quickly at the monkey and then runs down the hall and back into bed. He immediately tries to pray, to cleanse the monkey from his mind, but instead he hears “End-of-the-world mutter” (338).
The Weather
A constant motif throughout the novel is the idea that the weather has been “strange” lately. Bant notices that people usually start their sentences with, “Strange as this weather has been,” or “With this crazy weather we’ve been having,” and she knows that “Lace believed the weather was linked to the rest of this mess” (101). Many of the characters comment on how the weather is unseasonably warm, or cool, or too clear-skied, and in this way, the weather patterns become symbolic of how coal mining is changing the landscape on a fundamental level. Not only is the physical landscape changing—with the flooding washing away yards, the animals dying, and the mountaintops being cleared—but these changes are even affecting the weather.
The unexpected weather change ties to the theme of loss. For the people living in Yellowroot, the landscape and the weather have always been predictable—they knew what plants they could harvest in different seasons, and they planned their lives around weather patterns. However, the effects of coal mining have uprooted everything they thought they knew about their home—knowledge they accumulated for generations. The changing weather signifies an uncertain future for both the hollows and its residents.
