58 pages • 1-hour read
The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus
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Themes
The Sacrifices of Motherhood
Through the novel’s titular symbol of the octopus, Knight explores the sacrifices of motherhood. The novel presents a wide variety of mothers who adopt markedly different approaches to their parental responsibilities, and each character grapples with this theme in her own way. Notably, Margot invents the idea of the octopus mother and insists that motherhood imposes a dichotomy. As she says, “There is little room for a mother’s self-interest in the narrative. There is only the selfish monster and the octopus” (326). In her account, the “monster” is the mother who cares for herself, while the self-sacrificing octopus allows “[h]er decomposing body” to become “a source of food for her young” (326). Margot’s uncompromising views on this matter compel her to reject many aspects of motherhood. She also refuses marriage and habitually prioritizes her career over her maternal duties, often leaving George alone on the holidays. While George insists that she understands why Margot behaved this way, she admits that she is still trying to figure out how to be a mother herself and that she does not share all of Margot’s beliefs.
Pen comes to reject Margot’s ideas and instead gravitates toward her mother and Christina as role models. Christina, who is thriving in her role as a mother and caregiver, offers a corrective to Margot’s idea of the octopus by explaining that the mother’s death serves an evolutionary purpose and ensures the hatchling’s survival. As Christina says, “The parents have had their turn, they’ve lived their lives, and their death gives the next generation a fighting chance to survive” (362). She tells Pen that it isn’t exactly the same for humans, but that parents should eventually become “redundant” “if we’ve done our jobs at all well” (363). For her, motherhood is an important part of her life, but it is not the only one, and she can imagine a future in which her children are adults and no longer need her.
Anna also finds motherhood fulfilling, and she sees a chance to provide Pen with the nurture that she never had from her cold foster mother. She has learned how to survive despair and resurrect herself. As the narrative states, “[Pen] thought of her mother, whose eyes had gone cloudy for a time, yes, but who had then begun to build the life she wanted, piece by piece” (327). Although Anna once experienced depression and suffered an overdose, she is adamant that she loves Pen and never intended to abandon her. Instead, she offers an example of how to pursue a beloved career while also being a nurturing presence.
Most importantly, the entire novel is framed by the concept of motherhood, for it is narrated by the adult Pen, who has just given birth to an infant daughter. This perspective colors her recounting of the past as she reflects upon the different versions of motherhood that she has encountered. During her recollections, her daughter plays with a stuffed octopus, and t. This toy serves as a reminder of the kind of mother that Pen does not intend to be, and the appearance of the octopus imagery in this innocuous form also reduces the horror of the symbol to something softer and more domestic. Ultimately, Pen comes to believe that the sacrifices of motherhood can coexist with its joys.
The Importance of Female Friendships
While Pen and Alice navigate career plans and romance, one of the central bonds that Knight emphasizes is female friendship, which is portrayed as a relationship that is just as important as romance or familial bonds. Initially, Pen and Alice are described as opposites, with Alice being “a tall and striking young woman with the coloring and survival instinct of a lioness, while Pen, a late bloomer, had […] the glow-in-the-dark eyes and skittish flinch of a black house cat” (12). The two characters’ differences are a source of fascination to one another, but Knight’s use of feline-themed comparisons also emphasizes their similarities. Although Alice’s temperament is implied to be much fiercer than Pen’s, both women have grown up in households with similarly unhappy parents who are navigating troubled marriages, and their past history powerfully dictates their current choices.
Additionally, the two friends’ enduring loyalty to one another renders them a formidable team, and antagonistic characters such as Julian often underestimate the true strength of Pen and Alice’s relationship. Although Alice maintains a cool and confident façade with outsiders, she shows Pen her deepest vulnerabilities. For example, when Julian assaults Alice, Pen is the person in whom Alice confides because she knows that Pen loves her despite her imperfections. As she reflects, “[T]his friendship could take them through every stage of their lives, cushioning them against the bone-crushing loneliness of being human, [because] they did not have to pretend with each other” (312). This honesty stems from their early childhood relationship and has survived because they continue to prioritize one another’s well-being over other concerns.
As a sharp contrast to Alice’s public reputation, Pen is perceived as a prim rule-follower and often finds herself underestimated. However, she proves herself to be both ruthless and brave when Alice is threatened. For example, Pen creates and implements the plan to trick Julian into providing actionable evidence of his affairs with students, and she even puts her own reputation in jeopardy when she becomes publicly known as the reason for his firing. Although Pen is uncomfortable with the attention, she wryly considers her reputation to be “donated […] to a good cause” (255) rather than lost outright. By dedicating herself to protecting Alice, who is still traumatized by Julian’s assault and emotionally fragile, Pen embraces a distinct role reversal and takes on the bolder stance in the friendship. This crucial shift in dynamic indicates that the friendship has brought out important qualities in both women. Ultimately, Pen and Alice’s bond helps them to navigate the difficulties of adolescence and adulthood and provides them with a firm foundation as they mature.
The Transition from Adolescence to Adulthood
Like all coming-of-age novels, The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus extensively explores the transition from adolescence to adulthood, and this aspect of the text becomes apparent in the very structure of the novel as the adult Pen narrates the story and delivers a thoughtful retrospective on her tumultuous first year in college, seeing it as the era that launched her journey to maturity. She also emphasizes her younger self’s inexperience and misplaced confidence, noting wryly, “I remember who we were, and what we thought we knew” (12). As the young Pen and Alice begin their first year of college far from home, excited to redefine themselves, they must soon unlearn many of their childish assumptions as they encounter new situations. For Pen, much of her journey involves leaving her comfort zone and beginning to pursue new interests separately from Alice, and she initially struggles to find her confidence and break free of old patterns. While Alice is usually the bolder of the two, “Pen often behaved as if someone were watching her and grading her on her manners, or her empathy, or both” (80). Throughout the novel, Pen learns to stop judging herself so harshly, and she no longer worries as much about other people’s opinions of her. Instead, she begins to rely on her own sense of morality and imagines what her future might look like if she were to break free of the path that her parents followed.
Pen also matures when she begins to see that she is not the center of the universe and that other people’s issues might not always revolve around her. Her time with the Lennoxes brings this humbling life lesson into focus as she begins to realize that the adults in her life are flawed people with their own foibles and agendas. After she endures the awkward weekend at Talmòrach, she eventually stops cringing at her own imaginary fears and realizes that the family’s distraction and thinly veiled turmoil had very little to do with her. Coming to a more mature understanding of the matter, she finds herself wondering incredulously, “How was it possible that she had viewed herself as the wronged party?” (215. Her realization leads her to additional ruminations on the realities of the people she knows. She muses that she is “beginning to understand how little she [knows]. Her parents and Christina and Lennox [have] decades on her; they [have] each withstood losses that she could not even imagine” (215). By gaining a more nuanced view of her family, she also finds the wisdom to set new boundaries and redefine the parameters of her relationships. To this end, she finally confronts her parents about their failed marriage and firmly tells her father, “I’m not a child. I don’t know what kind of relationship we can have if you don’t respect me enough to tell me the truth” (345). The conversation becomes a personal milestone for Pen when Ted reluctantly agrees to her terms. Likewise, in further conversations with her mother, Christina, and Margot, Pen also begins to realize that mothers are more than just nurturers; they are individual women with their own lives, fears, hopes, and ambitions. Thus, the novel concludes with the adult Pen’s reflections on these important lessons as she, too, thinks about how best to introduce her own newborn daughter to the world and when to pass along her hard-earned wisdom.
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