When All Is Said

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapters 6-7

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

The Edward VIII Coin

The Edward VIII coin is a central symbol in When All Is Said. Griffin opens the book with Thomas’s advert for a second one, planting its importance from the first page. It is a defining part of the plot that runs through all of Maurice’s stories and has thematic significance. Not just any coin, the Edward VII coin is made valuable by the story of Edward VIII’s abdication to marry his lover. His desire to defy tradition and face the same way as his father on the coin symbolizes the significance of intergenerational relationships to Maurice and in particular to Thomas, whose complex relationship with his father figure and his inheritance shapes his life.

As an antique, it has literal value, but Griffin uses a coin as this is also symbolic of wealth: Thomas’s loss of it represents the financial decline of the Dollards, and Maurice’s carefully guarded possession of it signifies his obsessions with accumulating wealth. His complex relationship to the values of Wealth Versus Human Connection plays out through the coin. He misleads Sadie about how he got it, and they argue about whether he should return it; he makes concessions to Noreen, saying she can have it, but it must stay in his house. These interactions show the way wealth both opposes and supports his need for human connection.

The coin also symbolizes The Way the Past Shapes the Present. Its value as an antique embodies the weight people give the past, which plays out narratively as Thomas’s obsession with it shapes the rest of his life. To both Thomas and Maurice, the coin comes to represent an entire complex history in which the interpersonal and the socio-economic are interwoven.

Finally, the coin relates to the theme of The Struggle to Communicate. It is shrouded in secrecy, from the way Hugh Dollard acquired it (through gambling, to Maurice’s possession of it. The coin shows the burden of repressing the truth. Once Maurice, Hillary, and Emily overcome their enmity to communicate fully about the coin, it begins to lose its power over them all.

Alcohol

The motif of alcohol plays a central role in shaping the structure of When All Is Said, which is centered on Maurice’s five toasts to five people. It encapsulates The Relationship Between Love and Grief. Toasts are a formal or ritualistic way to acknowledge both these emotions in connection to a person. They are associated with weddings, funerals, memories, and important relationships. Maurice chooses different drinks for different people, showing their individual qualities and importance to him.

He uses stout to toast Tony and Noreen, both of whom he has a sibling relationship with. Stout is often drunk in pubs in Ireland. As a social drink, it represents a companionable relationship. Maurice used to drink it occasionally with his father, and they gave it to Tony when he was sick—due to its iron and calorie content, it was often seen as having nutritional or even medicinal qualities. Stout shows his familial and caring relationships with Tony and Noreen.

The other three people Maurice toasts are emotionally even closer to him: His two children and his wife. He uses a more expensive drink for these toasts: whiskey, selecting different specific, high-quality labels for each person. This symbolizes their enormous value in his life and the unique, complex impact each one has on him. He drinks Bushmills for Molly, the whiskey that he uses as a gesture to reach out to Emily and that she later gives him, cementing their relationship. This choice reflects that he sees Molly in Emily. He drinks an expensive, high-quality Midleton to Sadie, recalling her enjoyment of it on special occasions and signifying her enormous importance to him, as he says he’s saved the best until last.

For Kevin, he drinks a whiskey that was a gift from him, a Jefferson. This represents Kevin’s move to America but his attempts to stay connected to his father despite the physical and metaphorical distance between them. Despite their differences, Kevin understands his father’s cultural roots and, through the whiskey, finds a way to express himself that Maurice can relate to. Whiskey is historically and culturally associated with Ireland, and the good quality bottles he buys him show that he respects, and has inherited, Maurice’s concern for wealth and success. Whiskey also symbolizes a connection to the land, which, to Maurice, transcends the cultural and physical distance between Ireland and America: He relates to the whiskey-makers who created this product through their hard work and the earth.

The Hotel

The hotel is the setting of the story, but also an important symbol of The Way the Past Shapes the Present and the significance of the novel’s socio-economic setting. The hotel is a reincarnation of the big house where Maurice spent formative years in his childhood, experiencing Tony’s death and the chain of events that set the story of the coin into motion.

Maurice recognizes specific features of the hotel, such as the chip in the wall that he made with a heavy crate of firewood when distracted by the grandeur of the grandfather clock. In this memory, Hugh Dollard is civil to him for perhaps the only time, showing how his past shaped Maurice’s obsession over wealth and his association of it with human connection. However, Maurice also finds the layout of the hotel confusing at times because of the work done on it—he cannot always work out how it maps onto the big house. Griffin uses the hotel to show how history echoes through the years, but huge changes also leave their mark. The reshaping of the physical building represents the reshaping of the community’s socio-economic structure.

The hotel has deep personal significance to Maurice. One of his happiest memories with Sadie was there, dancing around the room at Kevin’s wedding. It encapsulates the joy of their love, which he relives in the final chapter. However, it also shows how his obsession with wealth interfered with their relationship: He broke his promise to book them into the honeymoon suite, which he now books into alone. Maurice’s choice to spend his last evening in the hotel, reliving his life there, shows the way that this building and the Dollards who own it have been a constant, definitive presence throughout his life. However, his choice to die by suicide in the honeymoon suite suggests that his love for Sadie is ultimately the most important force in Maurice’s story.