Cat's Eye

The revelation of Stephen’s death is shocking, even though it was suggested at the outset of the novel. The narrative is related through memories Elaine has pieced together from other witnesses and is relatively emotionless and sparse. Stephen and Elaine became increasingly distant from the moment the family moved to Toronto, and the story of his death is more detailed than that of any other part of his adult life. His death brings the previously abstract specter of war and violence into the novel and into Elaine’s adult world; the fact that Elaine imagines his death as a natural disaster again brings up the theme of survival and how one might escape an inevitable fate. It is no coincidence that Stephen himself saw humanity’s doom as inevitable and therefore difficult to mourn.

Stephen’s death also reintroduces the story of the twin who travels in space and returns 10 years younger than his brother. Elaine, like the brother, will continue to age while Stephen remains frozen in time, suspended in a moment of flight as he later is in her artistic depiction of his death. The motif of wings and flight also arises as Elaine imagines the moment of his death as a moment of freedom rather than trauma—an idea that echoes her imagined suicide on the bridge.

With Elaine’s father also dead, her return to her parents’ home (though not the same one in which she grew up) also develops the idea of Memory and the Passage of Time. When she discovers the cat’s eye marble, Elaine is able to “look into it, and see [her] life entire” (420). It is a relic of her childhood trauma and demonstrates how reality is subjectively experienced through the objects and experiences that shape individuals. It also proves the inescapability of the past, which is layered upon the present through the marble and in Elaine’s old neighborhood, which she explores in the novelistic present. The more time she spends in Toronto, the more the past and the present merge; when she sees young girls playing in her old neighborhood, she sees her own childhood mirrored in them. Little seems to have really changed.

Elaine’s retrospective is the ultimate blending of the past and the present; that the exhibit bookends the narrative contributes to the sense that the novel is itself a retrospective of her life. In the gallery, she examines each of her artworks, placing the focus on Vision and Visual Art as each painting shows an aspect of her life through her own unique perspective. Others portray adult role models as she imagined them as a child, underscoring shifting identity across life stages. The painting Cat’s Eye exposes Elaine’s fragmented identity and the way in which she is haunted by the childhood trauma she experienced at the bridge. By contrast, when looking at the images of Mrs. Smeath, Elaine can empathize for the first time with her childhood tormentor and see in her eyes (as she has depicted them) the reason for some of her cruelty; such works provide healing. Still other works integrate important symbols—the bridge, the Virgin Mary, marbles, the cat’s eye, etc. These symbols and meanings accumulate as Elaine examines the paintings, and her concluding thought—that she has lost control over the meaning of her experiences—is a destabilizing one. However, it also suggests that she is ready to begin anew without the burden of these memories holding her back.

Cordelia never arrives at the retrospective (or, presumably, at the measure of peace that Elaine does), and Elaine feels her absence as a constant presence. The novel’s conclusion is one of anticlimax: The long-awaited confrontation with Cordelia never occurs except as an imagined conversation in Elaine’s mind. Revisiting the rebuilt bridge of her childhood, Elaine reflects on the simultaneity of change and preservation. The bridge contains beautiful buried treasures from her past, like marbles, but also repressed traumas. This visit to the bridge is the culmination of her feeling of being in the middle of a bridge. In an imaginary exchange, Elaine assumes power over a projected Cordelia, attempting closure with the past. Though Cordelia never appears, Elaine finds resolution in acknowledging tormentors and events from her youth while embracing their passage into the past. She crosses the bridge into a new, freer future.

The novel concludes with speculation around this future. Elaine’s sadness on the plane home that she will never have a future with Cordelia is paired with her contemplation of the stars in the sky, which represent a distant and totally inaccessible past. The novel concludes on a note of uncertainty and hope: Where the stars were once thought to be eternal, modern science has proved otherwise. No matter what hold the past has over us, it is suggested, time passes and things change.