62 pages • 2-hour read
The Fisherman
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Symbols & Motifs
Content Warning: This section of the guide contains descriptions of graphic violence, sexual content, child death, emotional abuse, suicide, substance use, mental illness, cursing, and racism.
Guilt
In the treacherous landscapes of Langan’s novel, emotions such as fear, hate, and love itself become the sharpest of Der Fischer’s hooks, dragging his victims to destruction. Guilt, which blends self-loathing with love, exerts the strongest pull because it lies at the root of the Fisherman’s centuries-long obsession. In 16th-century Hungary, he murdered his wife and children, putting the blame on Hungarian soldiers. However, every action that he takes in his long life afterward—the centuries of scholarship, the scheming, the beguiling of others, and finally the methodical hooking of the Leviathan—is forged in the undying crucible of this original guilt. This dynamic becomes clear at Dutchman’s Creek when Abe sees the Fisherman twisting his hat in an agony of remorse, then glimpses a vision of him slaughtering his family. Because the Fisherman is obsessed with bringing his family back from the dead in order to atone for his deed, he has ironically sacrificed countless victims to this unholy ambition, luring them with the same self-loathing that fuels his own obsession.
A prime example occurs when Helen dies by suicide at the Ashokan camp, for the Fisherman manipulates the guilt of her philandering husband, George, drawing him into a Faustian pact to restore Helen to a macabre semblance of life. At Dutchman’s Creek years later, Rainer similarly fends off the reproaches of his long-dead colleague, Wilhelm Vanderwort, and Jacob, too, is haunted by the cadaverous double of his friend, Angelo, whom he killed with an axe in self-defense. Decades later, at this same creek, Dan Drescher, whose negligence led to his family’s demise, is lured by avatars of his guilt who devour him alive. The Fisherman thus uses the power of guilt as his principal hook to corrupt others and siphon off their life force, keeping himself immortal and fueling his eternal struggle with the Leviathan. Ironically, however, he is not immune to guilt’s power, for at Dutchman’s Creek, a rivulet of the “dark sea” exhumes a doppelgänger of his own murdered wife, who spits “venom” at him as he weeps with remorse.
Whiteness
Moby-Dick, the principal literary model for The Fisherman, devotes an entire chapter to “The Whiteness of the Whale,” wherein Ishmael shudders at Moby-Dick’s color. Evoking the pallor of corpses and the horror of the shroud, Ishmael also ponders its monolithic negation of color, warmth, and life. Similarly, the colorlessness of the Leviathan in The Fisherman is described as “perfect in its nothingness, its nullity” (243). Thus, Langan taps into this common imagery in Abe’s nightmare of hooking his dead wife, as Abe describes, “I flew headlong into the white water and open mouths full of white teeth, rows and rows of white teeth in white water” (33). The shade of white is frequently associated with the supernatural and with death-imagery throughout the novel; Dan’s family is wiped out by the “great white beast” (18) of a speeding truck, and the feral creatures who infest the dark waters of Lottie’s nightmare and Dutchman’s Creek are all macabrely “white” as well. Even Dan’s scar from his life-shattering accident is bright white, and, when Abe approaches Dutchman’s Creek, “tiny white cracks” (243) spider across the landscape, exposing the void beyond. In short, the shade of white is depicted as being infinitely purer than darkness in its menace and is manifested in the color of serrated teeth, tumbling foam, oblivion, pasty doppelgängers, and the terror of sudden death.
Skin
The Fisherman as a whole constitutes a story of ominous transformations that overlap in a living palimpsest of trauma and the supernatural. After Dan Drescher’s catastrophic car accident, the most visible sign of his deep psychic injury is the white scar that bisects his face, giving it the appearance of something “knitted together.” This imagery foreshadows Dan’s later obsession with “punching” through the world’s “masks,” as if the skin of his own face is a mask that has been partially ruptured, showing him a macabre truth. Similarly, Marie’s fatal cancer shows itself in her skin, which has “pulled tight against the bones of her face” (8), exposing the skull behind her mask of forced cheer. Likewise, the “white demons” who masquerade as the resurrected dead bob in the “dark sea” of Lottie’s apocalyptic vision and betray themselves by their unnatural “porcelain white” skin, the uniformity of which suggests a connection with the strange pelts that Cornelius and his “Guest” once sent to the local tanneries with “very specific instructions” on how to process them. In The Fisherman, skin becomes a symbol of the world’s façades, which crack at the seams under the pressure of unseen, malign forces.
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