53 pages • 1 hour read
Jodi PicoultLeaving Time
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Symbols & Motifs
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BetaSymbols & Motifs
The Pebble Necklace
The pebble is used symbolically to suggest fidelity or the loss of it. We’re first introduced to the symbol by Thomas, when he talks about the courtship rituals of penguins. The pebble is a gift from the male penguin to his chosen, lifelong mate. The meaning of the pebble changes over the course of the book. First, it’s an indicator of Thomas’s love for Alice. Later, a pebble necklace becomes a clue in Virgil’s search for hard evidence.
We are told that Alice wears a pebble necklace that she never takes off. The reader naturally assumes that the necklace was a gift from Thomas. However, when he sees Jenna wearing the necklace, Thomas views it as a sign of betrayal and slaps her. We later learn that it was actually a gift from Gideon to Alice as a sign of his fidelity. It might also be viewed as a symbol of Alice’s fidelity toward Jenna. The girl interprets it as a message from beyond the grave. It’s a sign that her mother wants to be found.
Elephant Origami
A dollar bill folded into the shape of an origami elephant is another symbol first introduced by Thomas. He uses it to defuse his tense initial relationship with Alice, and it continues to perform this function throughout the book. Alice later uses it to distract and calm Jenna when she’s a fussy 3-year-old. As a teenager, Jenna crafts them to calm herself down. In the final pages, when Alice is furious with Serenity, the origami elephant in the psychic’s purse immediately causes her to forget her anger.
Blue Scarf
. Alice’s blue scarf symbolizes a connection between mother and daughter and functions as something akin to a lifeline. Jenna wears it as a way of remaining close to her mother. The scarf itself reinforces that connection when it floats away on a breeze and becomes snagged in a tree branch in the elephant sanctuary where Serenity and Jenna are hunting for clues. In the process of retrieving it, Jenna finds her mother’s wallet. The scarf, then, functions as a connection point.
Later, we learn that Alice first starts wearing the scarf to cover bruises on her throat after Thomas tries to choke her. Covering up an injury is a way of denying it exists. Jenna also uses the scarf as a cover-up in denying the memory of her own murder. When Jenna’s grandmother rips the scarf in half, it’s an attempt to break Jenna’s connection with her mother and the girl’s fixation on the past.
Elephants
Elephants are the most prominent motif in Leaving Time. They function to illustrate the major themes of the book. An elephant’s ability to remember everything stands in contrast to Alice’s desire to forget her past trauma. Such persistence of memory also represents a strong counterpoint to Jenna’s inability to remember where she was on the night of the accident.
Despite their long memories, elephants have the capacity to forgive human error. This is a trait that Alice fails to demonstrate herself. She can’t forgive herself for the disasters that happened at the sanctuary as a result of her impulsive affair with Gideon.
The fact that elephants are excellent mothers is also a source of fascination and reproach to Alice because she feels herself to be a failure as a parent: she couldn’t prevent Jenna’s murder, or the miscarriage of her second child.
Lastly, the elephant grieving process is a dominant feature that Alice studies obsessively. She wants to understand how they can grieve so deeply and still manage to let go after enough time has passed. The loss of her mother and Jenna has devastated her to such a degree that she fears she may never learn how to let go.
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By Jodi Picoult
