The Passage

Amy’s toy travels for nearly a century to find her. Peter represents her childhood, and the “Time Before,” as well as the childlike qualities she retains at the novel’s conclusion. She is carrying the rabbit when the reader first meets her. When she meets Lacey, she asks for Peter. Peter is “velveteen plush, worn smooth in shiny patches, a little boy rabbit with beady black eyes and stiffened by wire” (57). He wears a blue jacket, like the rabbit in Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit stories. Peter also connotes the story The Velveteen Rabbit, in which a stuffed rabbit comforts a boy with scarlet fever. Wolgast brought Peter to her in the sick room for comfort. When she meets Lacey on the mountain, Lacey gives Peter back to her: “The fabric was crumbling away; one of his ears was gone, exposing a wire” (702). Peter journeys through a century before rejoining Amy, battered but not destroyed, exactly like Amy’s innocence.

Babcock is one of the Twelve. He symbolizes the vampire/viral at its most frightening and deadly. He enslaves people through dreams of his abusive mother, testing and breaking them. He demands sacrifices from the humans at the Haven. He is massive, cruel, and talks constantly. He is the ultimate manifestation of the negative aspects of Project NOAH.

Jacob Marley is a character in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, which Amy reads to Wolgast in Colorado, where they discuss ghosts. Later, the virals follow Amy, pleading with “their question, dragging it like a chain, like the ones she’d read about in the story of the ghost, Jacob Marley” (351). Later, she tells Peter that Jacob Marley, “wore the chains he forged in life [and that] it was such a sad story” (627). Marley’s greed dooms him. A former partner of Ebenezer Scrooge, Marley wanders through eternity, dragging his chains and bank boxes, poetic representations of his choices. In the same way, each viral holds vestiges of their identity before becoming a viral, and it is each of these charms that Amy helps them recognize in order to cross over to death.