The Spear Cuts Through Water
65 pages • 2-hour read
Simon JimenezThe Spear Cuts Through Water
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Storytelling as a Means of Identity Formation
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, child abuse, and suicidal ideation.
The Spear Cuts Through Water is a frame narrative in which the act of storytelling is central to the story itself. Stories appear in many forms, including the story performed on stage, Lola’s stories to the grandchild, stories shared by characters throughout the nested narrative, and even the stories that characters tell themselves in the privacy of their own thoughts.
These examples demonstrate the power and purpose of storytelling in creating identity, both for communities and for individuals. Both the central nested story and Lola’s stories to the grandchild demonstrate the power of stories to craft cultural identity. Lola insists on telling her stories of the Old Country to the grandchild, despite the grandchild’s reluctance and occasional disinterest, because she wishes to pass on the cultural memory of her homeland. The family has lived as immigrants in the Unified Continent for several generations, and Lola fears losing their connections to that cultural identity. She attempts to rebuild that identity in the grandchild through stories.
The grandchild expresses not only disinterest but also embarrassment over these stories. Their embarrassment stems from their inability to identify with the Old Country or with the history that Lola remembers. However, by the end, the story performed in the Inverted Theater sufficiently demonstrates the grandchild’s personal connections to the past. The stories themselves are part of this argument, but the symbolic value of Araya’s spear also supports this argument. As the grandchild states in the final chapter, the spear becomes “a sewing needle, stitching two distant points of time together in one unending embrace” (501), strengthening the tenuous connection that the grandchild feels to the Old Country and thus instilling a new sense of ownership and respect for the stories and the culture from which they arose.
In addition to cultural identity, stories are also vital in crafting individual identity. In fact, the novel argues that each individual is made of the stories they contain and inhabit. To demonstrate this, the narrative allows characters to share their stories in their own words, including the empress and even very minor characters. These examples demonstrate the importance placed on the stories that one tells about themselves. The novel states that “stories are everywhere, you cannot avoid them. Every day you tell a story to yourself; the details of your day become part of your myth” (352), arguing that the stories an individual tells to themselves about themselves allow them to make sense of their lives and place in the world. The narrative reiterates this again when Keema confesses that he made up the stories about the Daware tribe because he has no history of his own. If the stories are not handed down from the past, such as those that Lola shares with the grandchild, he must make them up for himself. These stories, both those handed down from the past and those made up in one’s own mind, are thus the pieces with which one crafts their own sense of identity.
Love as a Source of Conflict and Healing
Love is a constant element of the novel, appearing in many forms: love of country, parental and sibling love, romantic love, and more. Love, the novel argues, is a complicated and powerful state of being that impacts everything and everyone, shaping not only individual lives but also the destinies of nations. The novel opens with the love story between the Moon and the Water, and Lola assures the grandchild that this story “is a love story to its blade-dented bone” (94). The imagery of a love that cuts through the story so deeply that it dents the bone suggests the depth, complexity, and pain associated with genuine love. This is supported by the consistency with which the novel portrays love and hate/violence as intertwined and inseparable. The grandchild loves but also fears Lola, who is a hard woman. The empress both loves and hates her children, the Three Terrors, and she is forced to destroy them to save humanity from endless war. Even the growing love between Keema and Jun is suffused with violence, as their repressed desire for one another finds expression in fighting.
Love is the most powerful catalyst for violence and conflict in the novel, leading some characters to their downfall even as it makes healing and redemption possible. Internal conflict often arises when a character’s feelings of love compete with some other goal or desire. For instance, the First Terror desires power, but his love for his sons ultimately overshadows that desire. Conversely, Jun continues to love his father and brothers, despite their violence and cruelty, but his sense of shame and guilt supersedes his familial love and loyalty. He thus chooses to betray his family in favor of the empress’s goals and his own need for redemption. The empress herself is conflicted by equally powerful feelings of love and hatred for her children, whom she ultimately kills with her own hands to end their reign of terror even as she grieves them.
Love drives these characters to actions that quite often lead to their downfall. The First Terror’s love for his children, especially his desire to avenge Jun, leads directly to his death at the hands of his brother, as well as the brutal deaths of all his sons. Likewise, Luubu’s violent form of love for his mother leads directly to her death and his own. The Three Terrors represent the ways that familial neglect and thwarted love can twist a person, leading to violence and tragedy. All three men feel neglected by their father and abandoned by their mother. All three express these feelings of yearning in violent and destructive ways. For Luubu, especially, his long-thwarted love becomes something expressed through possession and consumption. This is the novel’s most literal representation of love as something violent and deadly—something that dents bone.
However, love also leads some characters to their salvation. This is best represented by the relationship between Keema and Jun, which becomes something valuable and powerful. Just as love drives the Three Terrors to violence, it drives Keema and Jun to kindness, purpose, and renewed hope. Keema, who has longed for a purpose his entire life, believes that he has found that purpose in loving and protecting Jun. Though Jun does not believe himself worthy of love, Keema’s love motivates him to continue living when he would rather have died a glorious death. Jun longs for redemption and forgiveness. He may never fulfill that desire to his own satisfaction, but the novel’s conclusion implies that the love shared between Jun and Keema represents at least one step in that direction.
Ending the Generational Cycle of Violence
When the empress convinces Jun to change sides and help her escape, the two become entwined in a shared journey toward redemption, which they both believe can only be attained in death. Both characters are haunted by the sins of their past that stem from their connections to the imperial family. The empress acknowledges her blame in creating the imperial family and giving them the power they needed to take control of the country. She sees herself as the beginning point for all the violence and tragedy that her sons have wrought, and she thus feels an obligation to end their reign. Meanwhile, Jun’s shame stems from being raised in this familial culture of violence and domination, which turned him into a murderer. Both have perpetrated great violence and have an obligation to do what they can to make it right. However, both are also victims of a culture of violence that began before them and extends far beyond them. The empress acknowledges this when she fantasizes about giving birth to a girl: She dreams that a daughter might end the generational cycle of violence, but she realizes that the patriarchal system around her would have prevented an empress from enacting real change. Likewise, though Jun is responsible for his own choices, the narrative acknowledges that he was raised within a system that made him blind to other possibilities. It is only after the empress enters his mind and shows him the truth of the world and his own actions that he is capable of change.
The cycle of violence has gone on for so long that neither Jun nor the empress can imagine a life outside it—each believes that they can atone for and end their participation in this cycle only by dying. Jun is certain that he does not deserve forgiveness, which prevents him from accepting Keema’s love. As Jun states in the Inverted Theater, “Redemption was out of our reach, but we could at least step toward it, and if we died on that long road, then all the better, for everyone” (404). The empress and Jun both believe that nothing they do now can ever counterbalance the sins, and the best they can hope for is that their deaths will remove some evil from the world. The empress fulfills her desire for death, performing a final act of penance by having the boys consume her body and gain her power. Jun attempts to follow her example by accepting the suicide mission to stop the tidal wave without question, fully intending to die in service to the cause. However, this desire is thwarted in the end when the dancer asks the Water to let Keema and Jun live.
The final scenes of Chapter 7 provide a different answer to the question of how to end the cycle of violence. Jun has tried again and again to give his life as repayment for his sins, and this offering is refused every time. Even the woman of the river Gathering, who wishes to kill him in revenge for the murders of her family, ultimately decides to spare his life. When he returns to the Gathering to offer his life as promised, she realizes that “whatever nightmares used to haunt [her], this young man kneeling before [her] [i]s not that nightmare” (513). She does not recognize him as the murderer he was. This implies that Jun has changed more than he is aware of. Many characters who should wish him dead believe that it is better for him to live. The novel thus argues that death does not offer redemption; only living with the guilt and striving to do better every single day does.
Unlock every key theme and why it matters
Get in-depth breakdowns of the book’s main ideas and how they connect and evolve.
- Explore how themes develop throughout the text
- Connect themes to characters, events, and symbols
- Support essays and discussions with thematic evidence