53 pages • 1-hour read
Wandering Stars: A Novel
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Symbols & Motifs
Dreams
Dreams function as a motif (and an element of craft) throughout Wandering Stars as a liminal space where characters can connect to their pasts, futures, and fears. When Charles ingests his morphine tincture, he is transported to traumatic memories of riding the train to Carlisle. The narrator explains this vision that “[j]ust now he is in a dream he doesn't know is a dream, which makes it real, though it leaves him across the years, and possibly, he believes it is real and so it is” (53). Dreams, and drugs, therefore, collapse both reality and time for Charles, who encounters the moments of his life that inform his present and cause him to run from it.
Orvil also experiences this collapse, mirroring his ancestor Charles even though he does not know it. He thinks, “Morphine was a trap. the thing brought dreams over into waking, and waking things back over into dreams to where you didn't know what was what. But it flew away the pain too” (167). Dreams, even those inspired by the intoxication of substances, connect Charles and Orvil, too. They are, therefore, windows into timelessness and even, possibly, a sense of being stuck even while they move characters across reality and time.
Hunger
Hunger is a motif for lack, desire, loss, and longing in Wandering Stars. The characters in the novel experience varying degrees of hunger for different reasons. Characters like Charles and Orvil experience hunger, or want, for drugs as a bottomless pit, which they try to fill with more and more substances. Charles likens this sensation to a wolf, something outside and inside of him that he cannot seem to shake. The narrator observes that “[t]he wolf was still following him. That wicked dog of need inside” (71). Orvil compares this hunger to excess and flight, noting its appearance even while he’s already had “enough.” The narrator says, “He wanted more [...] the slight waning already there inside the bright high, asking for more even as he hung a few inches off the ground” (244). Both Charles and Orvil, longing not only for escape but to feel a sense of relief from the pain they carry, hunger for something beyond their own lives—something deeper which they can’t seem to reach, numbing this sensation through substance use disorder.
Other characters experience this same hunger, wishing to know more deeply something that feels beyond their reach. Opal asks herself of Lony, when they are at Alcatraz Island together and she watches him desperately moving to the chants and music, “What was it that she’d failed to provide him that he was so hungry for?” (266). In each of these instances, some longing propels the characters forward even while they seem to have what it is they’re looking for. Victoria, too, experiences a sense of longing while she grows up with white parents, not knowing she is Indigenous American. The narrator says of Victoria that “[n]ot knowing will leave you empty but fill you with wonder, with curiosity, with hunger to know who you are, why for example you are the brownest person in every room” (98). The loss each of these characters has experienced, of identity, memory, and love, manifests inside them as hunger throughout the novel, representing the devastating lack such generational violence has created for Indigenous people in America and the power it creates in seeking answers from history and within oneself.
Shrapnel
Orvil’s bullet fragment, which is shaped like a star, symbolizes the pieces of past, present, and future that he and the others carry within them. It is a symbol of the phrase and namesake of the novel Wandering Stars, which details the displacement of the Indigenous American diaspora, even when every individual of the diaspora carries the weight of history, stories, and culture within them—like Orvil’s star-shaped bullet shard. The bullet symbolizes the violence and weight of such history, as well as the individual resilience it takes to survive it. This resilience, however, is not always a victory and is, instead, sometimes a deeply painful, alienating process.
The star-shaped bullet is also a symbol of the broader motif that the descendants of the Star family are “wandering,” much like many survivors of the Indigenous American diaspora, as “wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness forever” (15). Though the narrative does not leave its characters wandering in darkness forever, it does track their journeys wandering through time and space to create their own narrative through their stories, their histories, and their relationships with each other.
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