47 pages • 1 hour read
M.L. StedmanThe Light Between Oceans
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 8-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1
Chapter 8 Summary
It is April, three months after Isabel’s arrival on Janus. It is her birthday, and she is pregnant. Both Tom and Isabel are overjoyed. Tom is full of mixed emotions about becoming a father. While Isabel is thrilled to share the news of her pregnancy with her parents, Tom has no desire to write his father or brother.
The reader learns more about Tom’s past. His father was exceedingly strict and abusive. He beat Tom regularly, and Tom’s brother, Cecil would tell on Tom in order to spare himself from their father’s strap. At age 21, after graduating from college and becoming free of his father, Tom sets out to track down his mother. The trail leads him to an abandoned room in a depressing boarding-house that smells of booze and cigarettes, where he learns that his mother had died just three weeks earlier. The scene is one that Tom never could have imagined. He enlists in the army a month later.
A violent storm keeps Tom on duty in the lighthouse all night. The noise of the storm drowns out Isabel’s cries for help, who is suddenly in distress and alone.
Chapter 9 Summary
Tom arrives to bed in the morning to find Isabel soaked in blood. She has miscarried, and she blames herself. She refuses to see a doctor. She feels the emptiness of the island and becomes depressed, comparing herself to the broken-down piano. The couple honor their lost baby with a small grave.
Tom surprises Isabel by arranging to have a man come out on the next store boat to Janus to tune the piano. Isabel, however, assumes that the man is a doctor and is furious, storming off for hours, until she realizes her mistake. She is overjoyed and grateful, albeit a bit embarrassed by her outburst.
Tom records the tumult of the day in his logbook.
Chapters 8-9 Analysis
Until his marriage to Isabel, Tom has experienced only death and loss, and his grief establishes a main theme of the novel: grief and loss. Tom’s losses are significant: He lost his mother twice, once as a child and again as an adult, and he has no connection to his father or brother. In the war, he watched many men suffer and die, and the tragedies of war cause Tom to lose parts of himself though he survives battle after battle. The arrival of Isabel and the expectation of a baby, therefore, seem like miracles. Tom is mystified by life—where it comes from, and where it goes when people die. The question seems never to have occurred to Isabel. When Tom explains that it mattered to him when he watched men die in the war, Isabelle seems struck for the first time by a fear of death and loss. The difference in mindsets leads them to experience grief and loss differently.
The theme of free will and fate is further developed in these chapters as Isabel seems to believe that she is in control of her future. This belief leads Isabel to blame herself when she loses her pregnancy. She sees herself as useless now, comparing herself to the broken piano: “It’s had it, I reckon. Just like me” (97).
After she experiences the miscarriage, Isabel’s emotions are intense and changeable. Tom later witnesses her fury transform into joy as she realizes that she has mistaken the piano tuner for a doctor; in this moment, he realizes that she is full of contradictions, like the mercury that makes the light go around. The symbolism of the lighthouse is complex. It can shed light and illuminate, but it depends on a substance that is not always predictable.
