No Two Persons: A Novel

In Alice’s and Tyler’s storylines, water is a symbol of renewal. After Alice’s brother, Peter, dies of an overdose, Alice finds solace in the pool. Swimming occupies her time and distracts her mind. Swimming doesn’t eradicate her questions about Peter’s death. However, Alice feels her questions “dissolve in the water, until it [is] the rhythm of her arms and legs and nothing more” (19). Water is a literary archetype that historically represents cleansing and rebirth. Water has this effect on Alice too.

Water similarly alleviates Tyler’s angst and trauma. In Part 3, Chapter 2, the narrator says that for Tyler, “Under was where the quiet was. Where you couldn’t hear the glass hit the wall, couldn’t hear your name being called” (122). Tyler’s “longing for submersion” remains visceral throughout his adolescence and adulthood (123). When he is swimming and diving, Tyler escapes his troubled reality. He discovers new worlds. He finds relief from his pain. This is why the narrator likens Saylor and Theo to swimming and water throughout Tyler’s chapter. The people and experiences that move Tyler resemble water because they renew and change him the way water does.

Miranda’s sculpture is a symbol of reinvention. Miranda is a trained and experienced visual artist. She gravitates toward “art that [lies] in the overlap, the mixing of metaphors and genres” (91). Her sculpture represents this overlap between the past and the present, the old and the new. The piece feels different to her because “[i]ts materials reach[] back into a past that [isn’t] hers, a history she [can] hold in her hands, solid and unmistakable—and then, through her imagination, the pieces change[] meaning, becoming hers, becoming her” (109). Miranda uses the refuse from the dilapidated farmhouse to construct new meaning out of a new form. Making the sculpture is an act of reinvention. In turn, Miranda remakes herself.

The sculpture reappears in the novel’s Epilogue. Alice finds a picture of it in a book at the New York Public Library during Madeline Armstrong’s memorial service. Alice studies the photograph and wonders, “What would that woman say? […] With that drawer of a mouth? With those wings?” (308). Alice’s mind resurrects and reinvigorates the sculpture. Her experience of the piece recreates its meaning once more.