Boy Parts
48 pages • 1-hour read
Eliza ClarkBoy Parts
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Symbols & Motifs
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of gender discrimination, sexual violence, animal death, graphic violence, and child death.
Rabbits
Rabbits operate as a motif in Boy Parts, threading through Irina Sturges’s photography and erotic life to expose Gendered Power Imbalances in Objectification and Abuse. The bunny head she pulls from her studio prop bin, described as “creepy” with a face “very… Beatrix Potter” (118), reframes a symbol of softness and vulnerability into an instrument of dehumanization. By fitting her models, Eddie in particular, into the rabbit head and pinning a fluffy tail to their underwear, Irina projects predator-prey aesthetics onto her subjects, completing the visual logic of a hunter cataloging her catch. The motif also appears in the name of Flo’s blog, “therabbitheartedgirl,” which represents both her constant desire to be possessed by Irina as a romantic partner and Irina’s willingness to exploit Flo’s emotional support without the intention of reciprocating or exploring the possibility of a healthier relationship with her.
The motif’s meaning shifts as it migrates from prop to lived encounter. When Irina first photographs Eddie from Tesco in the bunny head, she fixates on his backside with the tail and thinks the image is “like a peach; I could bite it” (118), framing him as something edible and small. The rabbit gear lets her treat compliance as cuteness, masking the violence of her direction with the soft visual vocabulary of a children’s book illustration. By their final shoot, the costume’s function darkens. Filming Eddie bent over the couch with the bunny head muffling his protests, Irina notices on later viewing that “you can see him trembling… on film it reads less like poorly contained arousal, more like a prey animal, pinned, helpless” (231). What began as whimsical prop becomes the visual proof of her objectification. Clark uses the rabbit motif to track how Irina’s gaze converts the people in her life into specimens, sweet enough to display and weak enough to consume.
Fritz’s Skeleton
Fritz’s skeleton symbolizes the thin line between the violence that Irina commits and the stories she invents to rationalize it. Fritz was Flo’s pet cat, who disappeared once under mysterious circumstances while in Irina’s care. In Chapter 7, when Irina drives to the wooded burial site expecting to unearth the skull of the boy she believes she murdered, she instead finds “a little cat skull… and a tattered collar with a bell, and tag that says ‘Fritz’ on one side” (194). The bones operate as displacement, a substitute that undermines Irina’s expectations. It becomes clear that Irina was responsible for Fritz’s death and burial, but it only creates more questions about the boy she keeps seeing, as well as the identity of the remains she thought she would find.
The skeleton’s meaning shifts as Irina’s perception of it evolves. Initially, Fritz represents collateral damage from a real murder, a pet sacrificed to conceal human violence. After the excavation, the bones acquire a more unsettling significance: they may be the only corpse Irina ever buried, suggesting “there was nothing to bury in the first place” (195). The collar’s bell, which Irina later hears jingling behind her throughout London, transforms the skeleton from buried evidence into auditory hallucination, a phantom that follows her into every scene of violence. The sonic afterlife of the cat mirrors the restlessness of Irina’s memory. By rooting the boy’s potential nonexistence in the verifiable death of a cat, Clark uses Fritz’s skeleton to expose how Irina rebuilds her past around scraps of guilt, allowing her to inhabit the role of killer without confirming whether the killing occurred.
Glass
Glass functions as a potent and recurring motif for The Unreliability of Memory. It materializes during moments of extreme stress and violence, representing the collapse of the line between perception and fantasy. During a violent encounter with Dennis, Irina’s mind projects a hallucinatory image of fragmented glass onto him, as she recalls, “He glitters like glass. Glass. Glass in his cheek, glass in his eye” (190). This recurring, imagined visual of glass shards in her victims’ eyes signifies the onset of a mental health crisis, a moment where her memories distort her experience of the present. Glass also plays a key role in her memories of the boy she believes she has killed, though the ambiguity over this boy’s existence exacerbates her uncertainty over whether the glass she sees shattering in the world around her is real. If she did kill the boy, then the glass is meant to represent her guilt, the idea that she can never escape her actions, no matter how hard she works to avoid accountability for them. If she merely imagined this encounter, then the glass points to unresolved feelings that drive her aggression, such as the trauma resulting from her abuse and the condescension she experienced from her wealthy urban peers when she was younger. The motif culminates in her date with Uncle Stephen. After he fails to comprehend her confession of murder, she shatters a champagne flute on his head, turning the internal signifier of her desire for violence into a physical weapon. This act demonstrates that her desires have become an undeniable, destructive force in the real world.
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