43 pages • 1 hour read
Blake CrouchRecursion
Fiction | Novel | Adult | 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
Rebirth
Each time a character uses the chair to travel back in time, their body dies in the deprivation tank, and they go to another moment in time. As the characters die and they return to life, these moments constitute a kind of rebirth. The symbol of the tank underlines this motif, as it looks like a large egg. By entering this egg, the characters are symbolically reentering the womb.
Both Barry and Reed experience moments in which they wish to return to infancy. When Reed regains memories of dying in the tank, he says that all the memories of his life played before his eyes, right back to being a baby with his family. He breaks down in tears, remembering what it felt like to be surrounded by love before he got addicted to heroin. Similarly, when Barry maps the memory that will take him back to the original timeline, he witnesses many of his memories in quick succession. The memory of being a baby entices him, as life was safe and uncomplicated, but he forces himself to return to the correct moment.
The Big Bend
The Big Bend is a large, iconic building in Manhattan that suddenly appears when timelines begin converging. Architect Amor Towles designed it, and Barry overhears him planning to work on his masterpiece in Hotel Memory. Presumably, Amor went back in time to improve his architecture career and design the Big Bend. He is murdered soon after the building appears, and Barry speculates that Slade’s employees attacked him as retaliation for making excessive changes to his timeline.
The Big Bend is made of two towers that curve and converge, forming an inverted U-shape. The Big Bend represents the catastrophic changes that can occur when an individual meddles with the past. Made of two towers that join together into a single building, it also alludes to the way in which two timelines can converge to result in multiple sets of memories.
Butterflies
Barry first sees a butterfly while at lunch with Julia for Meghan’s birthday, prompting him to think about reincarnation and the possibility that Meghan could return as a butterfly. He returns to this thought in the Epilogue, when he is again having lunch with Julia. Like butterflies, Barry’s memories of Meghan are beautiful, delicate, and difficult to pinpoint or contain.
In chaos theory, the butterfly effect refers to the idea that minute actions can begin a chain of events leading to unforeseeable results. The term derives from the notion that a butterfly flapping its wings might cause the air to move in such a way that it eventually causes a serious change in the weather. The butterfly effect draws attention to the exact moment an action changes the eventual outcome. The first time Barry sees a butterfly in Recursion, he has recently encountered Ann Voss Peters. For Barry, this is the moment that starts the rest of the events in the book.
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By Blake Crouch
