The Boys in the Boat

Four-leaf clovers pop up several times in the novel, as they are one of Joe’s personal symbols. After an adolescence spent foraging, Joe develops an “uncanny knack for finding four-leaf clovers” (68). Though Joyce is apt to call Joe’s ability luck, he disagrees, saying it’s a matter of “keeping your eyes open” (69). If one stops looking for clovers, one will never find one. Joe later uses the ruse of a four-leaf clover hunt to propose to Joyce, and Joyce sends Joe off to the Olympic preliminaries with a four-leaf clover sign. As Joyce nervously listens to the results of the Berlin Olympics, she lays the four-leaf clover Joe gave her “atop the radio” (339). When Joe and his team win the gold medal, she takes the clover down, “crying unabashedly, rapturously” (351).

Four-leaf clovers feature in key moments of Joe’s life: his engagement to Joyce, the final Poughkeepsie Regatta, and the Olympic games. Throughout all these events, the clover represents Joe’s particular combination of luck and willpower. Joe has grown up decidedly unlucky, but he refuses to let his situation intimidate him. He achieves remarkable things through determination, represented by his dogged hunt for clovers. Joe believes that self-will and openness will win the day, not luck, economic or otherwise. Despite this, Joe’s success is still a partial product of good luck. He is lucky that Pocock and Ulbrickson give him a chance, for example, so the clover is a fitting symbol of his journey.

The Olympic gold medal is an important symbol for Joe, though he does not initially realize why it is so significant. Long before Joe and his teammates reach Berlin, Joe thinks about the gold medal and what it would mean to receive one: “A medal would be real and solid. Something nobody could deny or take away. It surprised him how much it had begun to mean to him” (196). Joe, who spent his childhood with nothing to call his own, not even a house or a family, desperately wants to possess something he has earned. He spent his childhood and adolescence in a state of extreme deprivation, and an Olympic medal—shining and gold—is the ultimate symbol of success and validation. It would belong to him, and it could not be taken in the way his mother, his family, and his home were taken from him.

When Joe finally does receive his gold medal, he turns introspective once again. He realizes that “the medal wasn’t the most important thing he would take home from Germany” (355). The bond he developed with his teammates, and the ability to “abandon all doubt, trust absolutely” (355), was the real prize. The gold medal simply symbolizes his emotional growth and his final passage from a child who was abandoned and traumatized to a man capable of trust, devotion, and love. Upon making this realization, Joe notes that he “felt whole. He was ready to go home” (355).