48 pages • 1-hour read
Tunnel of Bones
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Themes
Fulfilling One’s True Purpose While Navigating Difficult Choices
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death and child death.
The difficult decisions that Cassidy Blake must make in the face of moral dilemmas to fulfill her true purpose shape the narrative. As the novel’s proactive protagonist, Cassidy makes things happen rather than merely reacting to the world around her. Thus, the thing that motivates her is what creates the story’s conflicts and moves the plot forward. Since she learned how to reap ghosts—to send them on—from Lara, a sense of purpose motivates her. Fulfilling that purpose requires Cassidy to make many difficult choices as she defines her responsibilities and ethical obligations in the role of ghost hunter. Through the plot’s actions, Cassidy realizes that she must do the right thing to protect those in danger, even if it puts her in morally ambiguous situations. By the novel’s end, she still faces tough choices that she has yet to address, which will propel the plot in the series’ final book.
Cassidy’s sense of duty to reap ghosts emerges as her central motivation, but the choices that she faces challenge both her sense of purpose and her understanding of responsibility. Cassidy interprets her recently acquired ability to cross into the Veil as a calling. Her wording is significant: “It’s my job to send them on” (8). She’s developed this conclusion, in part, based on Lara’s mentorship. Lara has been reaping ghosts longer than Cassidy by several years, so Cassidy trusts Lara’s knowledge of the Veil and her understanding of their shared ability. Cassidy’s experience of ghost hunting provides even stronger evidence that her ability is a calling: “In those seconds, right after the ghost moves on, I feel…right. What you feel, said Lara, is called a purpose” (28). Cassidy doesn’t know where spirits go when she sends them on, but she can tell that they aren’t meant to be left behind and trapped in the Veil. Those spirits are bound by some traumatic aspect of their deaths, which they act out again and again, unable to accept that they’ve died and therefore unable to move on. Cassidy infers that reaping them frees them from an eternity of suffering and sends them to whatever rest or afterlife brings final peace. She also protects the living from spirits who, like Thomas, can interact with the physical world and do harm.
Despite Cassidy’s clear, heroic purpose, several factors complicate her goals and challenge her ethical framework. Her parents don’t know about her paranormal abilities, and, like the parents of any 12-year-old, they limit her independence to protect her. The Veil also poses a significant danger to Cassidy in the form of ghosts trying to kill her and spatial overlap between the two sides of the Veil. Finally, her best friend is a ghost. Cassidy doesn’t consider herself obligated to reap the ghost of every Veil she comes across. During her first visit to the Catacombs, she intends to stay out of the Veil, noting, “I have no desire to find out what’s on the other side of this particular Veil” (37). When a ghost becomes a threat to the living, however, it changes her sense of obligation. In a pop-culture allusion, she and Jacob quote a Spider-Man line about the responsibility that comes with great power. She’s willing to put herself in danger to face a poltergeist that’s threatening an entire city. The fact that her paranormal energy is what drew Thomas out adds to her feeling of responsibility for the havoc he wreaks.
The decisions that Cassidy faces about her relationships, especially with her best friend and parents, force her to confront her values and the weight of her actions. She must decide when her responsibilities in the Veil justify lying to her parents about where she’s been and even destroying their film. These choices are tough but manageable given the circumstances: “I remind myself that people’s lives are in danger. That I have to do the right thing, even if the right thing in this instance has a dose of wrong mixed in” (155). When it comes to the choice of her best friend, though, Cassidy is profoundly conflicted. She generally agrees with Lara that as a ghost, Jacob doesn’t belong. He’s also going through changes that could make him dangerous. Yet his loyalty, support, and protection make him a friend she doesn’t want to lose, and the thought of sending him on feels like the ultimate betrayal. Cassidy will have to learn more about her purpose and responsibilities in the final book of the series to make the toughest choice she faces.
Overcoming Fear and Embodying Bravery to Address Challenges
Cassidy’s bravery emerges through her conscious decision to face fear, a theme that the author reinforces through her dynamic with Jacob and the challenges she encounters head-on in her ghost hunting. Cassidy’s conflicts with paranormal entities pose a significant danger to her. They also take place in eerie settings and involve forces beyond scientific explanation. These factors inevitably create fear, something that Cassidy must overcome to fulfill her purpose of helping spirits move on and protecting the living from dangerous ghosts. Doing so is a choice; though she sometimes gets pulled into the Veil involuntarily, she can leave immediately, and most of the time, she enters the Veil or searches for Thomas with intention. Tunnel of Bones uses Cassidy and Jacob’s friendship, motifs, and pop-culture allusions to show the intertwined nature of overcoming fear and embodying bravery to confront obstacles. In doing so, the narrative underscores that courage is a necessary choice to address challenges—one that friendship and teamwork strengthen.
Cassidy’s relationship with Jacob highlights how her bravery is rooted in emotional support and the willingness to act despite fear. Jacob is typically the voice of caution and the one who’s eager to avoid risky situations, while Cassidy is more impulsive and reckless. However, Cassidy notes, “I forget, sometimes, that so much of Jacob’s fear is an act, made to make me feel braver” (171). This dynamic emphasizes Jacob’s loyalty and his selflessness as a friend. He’s willing to forgo pride to give Cassidy comfort and help her be heroic. Their dynamic also adds complexity to Cassidy’s characterization. It reveals that she isn’t fearless but rather that she overcomes her fear out of a sense of responsibility. Her choices underscore that bravery means acting despite fear, not in the absence of it.
Cassidy’s journey is shaped by recurring elements, including her nightmares and her father’s wisdom; together, they reinforce the idea that bravery is a choice to face and encourage Cassidy to push through fear. When she is trapped in a pit of bones in the Catacombs, she finds courage in her father’s saying, “The only way out is through” (175). She first uses this phrase to push through her fear in Chapter 5. Its recurrence marks the adage as a motif, emphasizing the text’s message about facing obstacles with courage. Cassidy’s recurring nightmares, which reveal the things she fears most, are another motif that develops the book’s messages about bravery. She provides a backstory about a nightmare she used to have regularly, in which she is buried alive. This makes entering the Catacombs even more daunting. Cassidy acknowledges that she’s scared to go in, but she clarifies that she’s not too scared. She chooses to face her fears. Cassidy’s nightmares about Jacob force her to consider what the changes he’s undergoing might mean and to confront the decision she has to make about him. Losing her best friend, especially if it’s by her hand, is a terrifying possibility. Her dream reveals how much it scares her, thereby foreshadowing the need for bravery as this conflict runs its course.
Through Cassidy’s actions and allusions, the text underscores that bravery is not an innate trait but rather a conscious, active choice. Cassidy’s allusions to the Harry Potter series also characterize her as brave. As a fan, she identifies herself as belonging to Gryffindor, the house associated primarily with bravery. Choosing this for herself—as opposed to being assigned to a house by an objective third party, like the sorting hat in the Harry Potter series—underscores that bravery itself can be a choice.
History’s Enduring Presence in Places and People
Cassidy’s experiences in Paris intertwine the supernatural with the historical, demonstrating how the past’s influence continues to shape the present. Cassidy sees what most living people can’t: another dimension of reality occupied by restless spirits of the dead that are very much alive, if not vibrant. Though the story is about literal supernatural phenomena, the author consistently draws connections between the paranormal and the past. Tunnel of Bones utilizes several elements, including its epigraph, setting, motifs, and main conflict, to demonstrate how past and present intertwine and influence places and people.
The author emphasizes the relationship between history and the supernatural early in the narrative, establishing the idea that the past continuously haunts the present. The book opens with an epigraph attributed to Laura Miller that immediately establishes the relationship between history and the paranormal: “The past is a very determined ghost, haunting every chance it gets” (3). Through setting, this relationship begins to take on more specific meaning. As the hotel clerk asserts, “Paris is a place of art, and culture, and history” (13). It’s no coincidence that Paris is one of the most haunted cities in the world. The Blakes visit the most famous cultural sites and landmarks in Paris and share how the history of those sites informs local lore and ghost stories. For example, they invoke historical figures like Queen Catherine and Jean the Skinner to explain ghost sightings in the Tuileries. These ghost stories lean on people’s natural fascination with all things unseen and unquantifiable, imbuing the past with mystery. This view of the past—open to the uncanny and enigmatic—portrays history as something fluid, which can never be fully known and always has something new to offer. In other words, history is eternally relevant and therefore eternally present.
Through motifs and the main conflict, the novel illustrates that history’s presence is not just a feature of the past but also a powerful force that actively shapes the present. In addition to connecting history to paranormal activity through setting, the ghost stories motif sets up an ironic contrast between story and reality that emphasizes the real danger that history’s obstinate presence poses. Mrs. Blake tells stories in a stylized way, which creates a sense of distance between the horrors they depict and reality. Cassidy’s experiences in the Veil shatter this illusion. There, she exists within a particular moment in history that a ghost’s trauma has kept in existence. The spirits of the Veil have brought the sights, styles, and worldviews of their time, intact, to the present. Thomas’s poltergeist is a literal manifestation of history. Simultaneously, his family’s descendants represent history’s endurance. The story of Thomas’s tragic death is a source of emotional wounds and intergenerational trauma for Sylvaine and Adele. Closure, in the form of Thomas accepting his death, provides a resolution for both. This highlights that the characters’ actions in the present can influence the past because the past and present are inextricably linked, and closure is necessary for them to better navigate the relationship between the two.
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