53 pages • 1-hour read
Full Measures
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Symbols & Motifs
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death and sexual content.
Doors
In the opening chapter, Ember’s mother, June, refuses to answer the three knocks on the front door early in the morning. It’s way too early for Gus’s ride to soccer practice or any other routine knock, so she instinctively knows what the knocks mean. The door separates her and her family from the certainty of irreversible tragedy, representing the threshold between life before and after devastating loss. The novel establishes this immediately, as June refuses to engage, so the door symbolizes the denial of a reality that one isn’t ready to face.
Ember’s decision to ignore her mother’s plea and open the door to face the uniformed soldiers is her first step in facing her fears. She prematurely assumes adult responsibility when her mother is unable to do so. Fully understanding the gravity of her action, Ember reflects, “I had opened the door to a fire, and it was poised to decimate my family” (4). This imagery conveys her realization that what awaits the family on the other side of the door isn’t just an interruption but a destructive force that will reshape their lives completely. The symbol thematically reinforces The Impact of Grief on Relationships and Familial Roles, as opening the door simultaneously introduces the family to a reality that shatters their world and thrusts Ember into a parental role.
Doors are thus potential harbingers of doom, thematically aligning with The Illusion of Control in a World of Uncertainty. This symbolism continues when Ember, while attending a party to find respite from tragedy and sudden familial responsibility, opens a door to find her roommate having sex with her boyfriend, Riley. Later, after Ember reads her father’s letter to her, she realizes that control is illusory and that love and loss are both parts of life. Therefore, she decides that, despite her initial misgivings about the uncertainty of a future with a military man, she’s ready to move forward with Josh, so she appears at his door to ask about how he knew her father. In this way, the novel reframes the symbolism of the door as opportunity and full acceptance of reality.
The West Point T-Shirt
When Ember’s estranged Uncle Mike enters the family’s home with a news crew to exploit their grief for a story, he presents Gus with a West Point Academy T-shirt. For Mike, the T-shirt is a prop he hopes will deepen public interest in the story since West Point is a military training facility. However, for Ember and her family, the shirt connects to their raw grief, reminding them of how their family patriarch spent much of his life in US military training and tours of deployment, and how their years without him ended in the ultimate sacrifice. In addition, the T-shirt represents Mike’s utter lack of compassion in trying to use the family’s tragedy for profit. Ember’s outburst of rage, in which she burns the T-shirt in the kitchen sink, releases the pent-up emotion she has kept in check for her family’s sake. She can’t bear the thought of her brother wearing this shirt, symbolizing the possibility of another family member joining the military. Afterward, she’s embarrassed that her love interest, Josh, saw her outburst.
Josh brings up the T-shirt incident in an emotionally charged confrontation with Ember in the novel’s closing chapters. The confrontation occurs shortly after she discovers his Army uniform and Purple Heart medal (which he received for his injury while serving in the same place in Afghanistan where her father died), and she feels similar rage over his lie of omission. When he finally corners her after class in Chapter 22, desperate to talk, he admits that when he saw her burn the West Point T-shirt, he was afraid to tell her that he’s in the Army for fear that she would reject him.
Military Uniforms
As a complex and continually present symbol in the novel, military uniforms represent the central conflict between love and the fear of loss. The Army Service Uniforms (“dress blues”) that the casualty notification officers are wearing when they arrive at the Howard family’s front door embody trauma, becoming a tangible image of the institution that the family patriarch served when he was killed and that delivered the devastating news to his family. This association causes Ember to vow never to risk loving a soldier. When she later discovers that her love interest, Josh, is in the military, his uniform symbolizes the very future she is determined to avoid, one defined by the constant threat of another catastrophic loss.
Her entire romantic arc centers on confronting the increased potential for loss that military uniforms symbolize in the wake of her father’s death. The uniform itself doesn’t change, but Ember’s perception of it must. Her father’s posthumous letter becomes the catalyst for this transformation, a voice from beyond the uniform that encourages her to embrace love over fear: “I love you, December, be brave” (308). This call to bravery empowers her to redefine what the uniform means. Her decision to attend Josh’s commissioning ceremony, where he wears the same dress blues that once signified only loss, marks her ultimate choice. There, the uniform transforms in her eyes from a symbol of death to a symbol of commitment and love that is worth the risk.
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