57 pages • 1-hour read
Saint X
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Chapters 8-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 8 Summary: “Ghosts”
Chapter 8 returns to Clive’s perspective. There have been many periods in which he has felt haunted or tormented by “the girl,” or Alison. He imagines that she is everywhere, watching him, even in his dreams.
Clive returns again to memories of childhood and his teen years, and here the character Sara Lycott is introduced. Clive is in love with Sara from an early age, but is always scared to talk to her. His friends both encourage him to try to talk to her and tease him about his infatuation with her. Edwin tells him that one day she’ll be his, with a confidence reminiscent of Clive’s grandmother.
Edwin and Clive get drunk for the first time at age 14 at Paulette’s Place. This same year, Clive, Edwin, and their friends became fixated on boxing, and they start fighting each other in the evenings after school. One day, a neighborhood girl named Berline begs them to let her join in, and Edwin makes Clive fight her. Clive breaks Berline’s nose with his first punch. He’s furious at Edwin for creating this situation, but his anger is fleeting.
When Clive is 15, the first resort opens on Saint X, and many more follow. This leads to a transformation of the island. The airport is expanded, allowing for direct flights from New York and Miami. Tourist shops open up everywhere, and it becomes normal to see white families at local spots. Keithley, the older brother of one of Clive’s friends, is the first of them to get a job at one of the resorts, and eventually the group starts sneaking onto the resort property at night. They take one of the resort’s speedboats for joyrides regularly, and find a private, unknown spot they refer to as the unnamed cliffs, which becomes a regular hangout spot.
One night, they decide to go to Faraway Cay. Clive still remembers the folktale about the woman and doesn’t think they should go, but the rest of them talk him into it. They go to the waterfall, and over the course of the night, Clive feels himself letting go, not only of the folktale but also of his mother.
The confessional passage at the end of this chapter comes from Desmond Phillips, one of the boys in Edwin and Clive’s childhood friend group . Years after Alison’s death, Desmond has made good money bringing resort-goers on tours, where he shows them all the sites connected to Alison’s death. He expresses his guilt over profiting off of his connection to Edwin and Clive.
Chapter 9 Summary: “Voices”
Chapter 9 opens with the first entry of Alison’s audio diary, which Claire has just received in the mail. There are dozens of cassettes, along with photocopies of the original cassette labels. The entries begin when Alison is 15, the very first recording made on the day she’s had sex for the first time, with her boyfriend Drew. The final entry takes place just before she leaves for the family vacation on Saint X. Claire listens to every tape in chronological order throughout this chapter, interspersed with narrative.
Claire is falling increasingly behind at work and is disinterested in her job, still obsessed with keeping tabs on Clive each night. Her compulsive behavior from childhood returns. As she listens to more entries from Alison’s audio diaries, she comes across several entries about her, in which Alison expresses sincere concern for how fearful and self-isolating Claire is as a child.
One night, Claire finally enters the Little Sweet instead of staying outside, and she manipulates an invitation out of Clive to join him at his table for dinner. She invents a false backstory for herself, in which she’s from Indiana, hinting that she, like him, may also be running from something. She joins him for dinner regularly after this.
Claire flies home to Pasadena to have Thanksgiving with her parents, her aunt Caroline, and her aunt’s boyfriend. The “mundanity” of the conversations around the table irks Claire. She remarks at how her parents fail to sense that she is in a downward spiral. In a confrontation with her mother about one of Alison’s diary entries, she decides that her mother is in denial about who Alison was. However, after listening to a diary entry about Alison’s embarrassment at getting a brand-new Audi for her 16th birthday, Claire is prompted to reconsider her judgment of her mother. She begins to question the accuracy of Alison’s representation of her own feelings and wonders if the diary entries are simply a venue in which Alison can reassure herself of her own good character.
Claire becomes further consumed by the diary and by meeting up with Clive. She skips her friend Jackie’s birthday party and calls in sick to work after staying up all night so that she can listen to the finally audio entry. When she finishes it, she immediately puts in the first tape and starts listening from the beginning. She begins to separate from reality, feeling as though she is “entering” Alison’s body and looking out through her eyes.
Chapter 10 Summary: “The Real Whenever”
Chapter 10 begins from Claire’s third-person perspective imagining herself as Alison during Alison’s final days.
Alison is relentlessly critical of her parents and other vacationers, who seem to take their privilege for granted. She is also critical of herself, questioning her assumptions about the apparent lack of wealth on the island. On the first night, she strips naked on the balcony while her sister is asleep, taking in the view.
Alison dwells on thoughts of privilege and race throughout the week, judging fellow vacationers on the beach. She starts to hang around Edwin whenever she can, joining him on his afternoon breaks at the end of the beach. She starts to join Edwin and Clive in the evenings, at first just to smoke weed in the parking lot, and eventually going out to Paulette’s Place with them. She tries to present herself as more aware of the world and less privileged than she really is, but she is immediately ashamed of this impulse. She learns that Clive has a son, and there’s trouble between him and the child’s mother.
On a very rainy day, Edwin bets Alison two joints that she can’t swim out in the choppy water, and she promptly proves him wrong. Alison also spends time throughout the week with the blond boy who goes to Yale, who is referred to as “Connecticut.” One night while they’re kissing, Connecticut touches Alison’s thigh, and she gets uncomfortable and leaves. On the last night, she smokes one of the joints she’s won with Connecticut, but leaves him again to go back to Paulette’s Place with Edwin and Clive. She gets drunk and dances with the two of them on the dance floor, and a desire to have sex with both of them crystalizes.
At this point in this chapter, Claire interjects to ask, “Does Alison seem awful to you? I admit that, as I channel my sister, I sometimes have an urge to shake her” (218). She wonders if her sister was reckless in a typical way, or whether there was something different and darker about her.
The confessional passage at the end of this chapter comes from Drew’s perspective. He is 37 and coming to terms with the fact that he’ll never know what happened to Alison. He recounts the years after Alison’s death and how difficult it was for him to be with other women for over a year after. It isn’t until after he’s married that he feels like he can leave Alison’s memory behind. He wonders if her desire to make everything “her business” (222) is what got her killed.
Chapters 8-10 Analysis
Chapters 8 and 9 express how Alison has become a powerful presence that permeates time and space for both Clive and Claire, highlighting the theme of The Evolution of Grief over Time. In Chapter 8, the following quote serves as a thesis for the chapter as a whole:
Like any ghost, she radiates. She is not content to remain within her own moment. She inhabits them all—not only her aftermath, but also the time before he even knew she existed, until every memory, no matter how sweet, turns bitter on his tongue (152).
Most moments from the chapters told from Clive’s perspective are retrospective, wherein he reminisces about events from his past on Saint X. In this quote, it becomes clear that even when remembering times long before he ever met Alison, she somehow colors or otherwise influences the memory. This particular chapter arrives at a significant memory of Clive’s: a night when he and his friends went to Faraway Cay. Despite the night being a beautiful and joyful memory, the final words of the chapter are “And the girl was already there. As they leapt and roughhoused and plunged into that cool, clean water she was beneath them, at the bottom of the pool, waiting to undo them” (162). Here, Alison has a supernatural reach into Clive’s life, imposing herself on the past and even the present day, as it seems to Clive that “this life is her doing” (151).
In Chapter 9, as Claire sinks deeper into her obsession, Alison becomes a dominant presence in a new way. When Claire finds entries in her sister’s audio diary about herself, she is motivated to push her own boundaries and finally works up the nerve to speak directly to Clive. While at first it seems as though Claire is simply motivated to correct her sister’s impression of her as a child, Alison’s influence intensifies with time, “giving [Claire] words” (178) and permeating her experiences with Clive. Alison’s presence continues to intensify for Claire as she binges on Alison’s diary entries, until Claire loses her own identity and becomes consumed by Alison’s at the end of the chapter: “I could scarcely remember a time when I’d heard anyone but Alison” (192). At this moment, Claire’s dissolution into her pursuit of her sister is complete. Unlike for Clive, for Claire, this is a welcome transformation.
Chapter 9 also engages with the theme of Fractured Identity, as Claire attempts to use Alison’s diary as a key to understand who she truly was. At first, Claire takes the entries at face value, taking a keen interest in one particular entry in which Alison talks about a dance recital that she felt had been a total failure. Claire is familiar with this event, and remembers Alison seeming overjoyed at how well her performance had gone. After listening to this diary entry, however, Claire believes that Alison was profoundly disappointed and expertly hid her true feelings. After listening to more entries, however, Claire’s belief in Alison’s diary as an accurate representation of her sister begins to erode: “You can see how a diary might become a useful tool, how it might be used to rewrite history, to recast the pivotal moments of one’s life to suggest a humbler, more critical self” (187). With this, Claire wonders if Alison used her diary to create a different reality.
In Chapter 10, when Claire inhabits Alison’s perspective, Awareness of Privilege, Class, and Race becomes a dominant theme. Alison seems to interpret everything through the lens of class. On the beach when the Thomas family is being served by Clive and Edwin, Alison acknowledges that her own discomfort on this trip is not only about her class, but because of race: “[I]f she is honest with herself, she does not find this arrangement uncomfortable because a person is doing something for her, but because a black person is doing something for a white person” (199). She cannot grasp the dynamics of global capitalism and the histories of colonialism and slavery that make her uncomfortable with the interaction: She wants the men to be employed but feels guilty benefiting from their service, and she wonders why she feels this way.
Claire’s understanding of her sister’s motivations becomes clearer in Chapter 10, or at least she’s able to guess at them with more confidence. While Alison is fixated on class and privilege, Alison is also obsessively self-aware, so that every move she makes seems influenced by a desire to be perceived in one way or another, highlighting the theme of Fractured Identities. As Claire puts it, “She arrived at Indigo Bay at that critical moment when the girl cuts herself on the shards of her own reflection and watches, baffled and thrilled, as the blood begins to flow” (203). This line encapsulates the experience of adolescence, and perhaps this is why Claire is able to assert this version of events with such confidence: She has also gone through adolescence and understands how one’s identity shifts during this time.
Claire’s desire for a clear storyline is at odds with her desire for accuracy in this chapter. Claire wonders how much searching is necessary to get at the truth. When she imagines a scene at Paulette’s Place, her descriptions are detailed. However, she has never been to the bar nor has she heard it described. “Is the bar I’ve created a terrible cliché?” she asks. “If so, how much does it matter? What quantity of truth resides within a story’s details?” (212). This question becomes increasingly crucial over time, as Claire wrestles not only with the truth but with her own motivations in needing to learn what really happened to her sister.
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