The Correspondent

Letters in the narrative are a recurring motif that supports the overarching theme of stagnation within fear. While letters serve as the basis for Evans’s narrative structure, they also operate as symbolic reflections of Sybil’s personality and her existential contemplations. In the case of the former, Sybil’s letters come to symbolize her duality: While she inherently avoids intimacy and closeness with others, she nevertheless desires connection with other individuals. They also portray her desire for order and structure by giving her an established format through which to communicate with others, and others, in turn, are also forced to respond in kind and in the same format. In the case of the latter symbolic reflection, however, the letters take on the notion of Sybil’s legacy and the possibility of a written account of her life. While Sybil valiantly defends leaving this kind of written heritage behind (“the sum of this interpersonal communication is the substance of your [Mick’s] life, relationships being, as we know by now in our old ages, the meat of our lives” [54]), the letters would come to symbolize an ethical dilemma for Sybil as she confronts her mortality and her declining eyesight. As she loses the ability to read, she often wonders what the point of all these “interpersonal communication[s]” has been as she herself will one day be unable to engage in them and parts of her life will not be recorded for posterity.