48 pages • 1 hour read
Donal RyanThe Queen of Dirt Island
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Storytelling
The motif of storytelling is central to the narrative of The Queen of Dirt Island. Saoirse grows up in a house surrounded by stories, from both her grandmother, who tells entertaining and bawdy stories of her childhood in Ireland, and her mother, who often tells Saoirse stories about her family and father. These stories shape Saoirse as a person and inform her arc. However, the novel also demonstrates how storytelling can be harmful. When Josh tries to write a novel based on Saoirse’s family, he fails to represent them in a respectful and vulnerable way, instead twisting the narrative into a generic potboiler thriller. Saoirse is hurt and offended by Josh’s novel because of the value placed on stories in her childhood, and she breaks up with him. Saoirse eventually becomes a writer herself, thus completing this aspect of her character arc: She develops from story-listener to storyteller and has become successful at it.
In the novel, stories are a form of self-knowledge; the women at the center of the novel define how they see themselves and their family through the stories that they tell. This motif is reinforced by the experimental structure of the novel; each of the 500-word chapters functions as a mini-story or anecdote that only takes its shape when contextualized with other small narratives to form the entire book. In this way, storytelling isn’t just central to the characters but is also central to how the larger narrative is constructed.
Pools
Natural pools of water play an important function in The Queen of Dirt Island. In various circumstances, pools of water are the setting for birth, death, and romance. When Saoirse and Josh finally commence their long-awaited affair, they head down for a walk with Pearl, “following a path by the shallow stream that led from the village to the shore of the lake, and stopping there on a tiny half-moon of shingle beach […] putting their arms around each other and kissing” (151). For the young couple, the lake becomes the symbol of their flourishing romance, and within the narrative, Saoirse frequently meditates on the significance of water.
While pools of water signify romance and love, they also signify death. Saoirse has other memories associated with lakes; for instance, the funeral where her uncle Richard told her she’d never return happened on an island in the middle of a lake. In addition, when Doreen attempts to kidnap Pearl, she takes her to the edge of a pool of water, “where the grass gave way to bracken and scrub and the hill steepened towards its summit” (182). The significance of pools, then, shifts toward danger rather than safety and love. After Doreen drowns herself in the water, Saoirse and Josh’s relationship starts to deteriorate: The symbol that their relationship was predicated on, water, has now transformed into a signifier of danger rather than comfort.
Naming
The process of naming children takes on a symbolic significance through the narrative. The first naming in the novel is Saoirse’s, whose name is “the name that revealed itself” (5). However, the name is a source of consternation for Eileen: “Once in the kitchen [Saoirse] heard her mother saying maybe it was foolish. A foolish choice. I wasn’t in my right mind and Father Ambrose even asked me at the time was I sure and of course I said I was” (5). While Nana is able to convince Eileen that her daughter’s name is the right choice, this wavering over names persists throughout the novel. For instance, after Pearl’s birth, Saoirse has a very difficult time choosing a name for her:
[I]t seemed so unimportant a thing to do, weirdly redundant, to put a label on this perfect thing, and so narrow her down to a single small collection of letters that made particular sounds that evoked a certain sensation or a certain way of being or a type of person. (102)
Paudie ends up being the person to come up with Pearl’s name on the fly. The difficulty over naming in the novel represents the mixed circumstances of both Saoirse and Pearl’s birth. Neither children were intended by their mothers, and while both Saoirse and Eileen care dearly for their children, their daughters’ births still represent a distinct change in the course of their lives. The uncertainty over names, then, shows the reluctance of both women to accept their new circumstances; the names then grow to symbolize the children’s new and permanent place in their mother’s lives. As the novel goes on, their daughters’ names become important and lovely to both Saoirse and Eileen, who now have accepted their children as central parts of their lives moving forward.
