Parents Weekend

The bonfire in Chapter 70, like the sea cave, echoes the setting and imagery from the night of Natasha’s death, which put the tragic events of parents weekend in motion. This repetition represents the idea that things have come full circle, creating a sense of finality that will allow the survivors to move on. Fire often symbolizes cleansing through the cyclical process of destruction and renewal. The controlled flames of a bonfire symbolize an intentional, ceremonial cleansing. Upon their graduation, the students choose the bonfire as a meaningful symbol of their readiness to leave trauma behind.

Cell phones act as symbols of technology’s immense impact on modern life. As the primary means of communication between parents and their college-age children, cell phones represent generational gaps and their specific impacts on individual families. Parents struggle to keep open lines of communication with their children and have little knowledge of their children’s secrets. Meanwhile, technologies like social media platforms allow students to feel that they’re sharing and communicating without establishing meaningful and authentic connections with others. This breakdown in communication and connection follows timeless patterns of generational divides, despite its unique manifestations revolving around specific forms of technology. Natasha’s cell phone, in particular, symbolizes how technology influences The Tension Between Individual Privacy and Public Safety. Her mother prefers not to look at the content of Natasha’s phone, arguing that “these days a phone is more personal than a diary” (277). However, doing so brings the truth of her murder to light.

Three of the five capstone student families are currently grappling with the effects of marital infidelity: the Roosevelts, the Maldonados, and the Akanas. The prevalence of infidelity is an aspect of realism in the novel’s depiction of contemporary society. Every family in the story has secrets, whether they’re secrets the family members keep from each other or try to hide from the rest of the world. Finlay uses infidelity to represent all of these secrets—thus acknowledging one aspect of The Duality of Public Image Versus Private Reality—and to exemplify the damage these secrets can do. In an era marked by the ubiquity of camera phones and social media, this motif suggests secrets are bound to come out sooner or later.