30 pages • 1 hour read
Anthony DoerrThe Shell Collector
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 2002A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Fate Versus Happenstance
The idea of fate is integral to “The Shell Collector,” and the shell collector’s relationship with this concept changes throughout the course of the story. As a child, when he encounters a mouse cowry for the first time, he asks in awe, “Who made this?” (13), marking an openness in the shell collector’s early life to the idea of a higher power, and this openness contributes to his appreciation for the wonders of nature.
His reaction to the arrival of the Jims reveals that he is still asking similar questions, though this time it is not about the existence of unique patterns in nature but about the course his life has taken. The arrival of the journalists prompts him to think back in time, attempting to uncover what event might have put the rest of his life—up to that point—into motion. “This all started when a malarial Seattle-born Buddhist named Nancy was stung by a cone shell in the shell collector’s kitchen,” the narration begins (11). However, in the next paragraph, the shell collector is less certain:
Or maybe it started before Nancy, maybe it grew outward from the shell collector himself, the way a snail’s shell grows, spiraling upward from the inside, whorling around its inhabitant, all the while being worn down by the weathers of the sea (12).
This shell imagery continues to be used throughout the story as a metaphor for the trajectory of the shell collector’s life, but it is ambiguous whether this indicates a belief in fate, in randomness, or even in indifference, as the shell collector ascribes all these qualities to the creatures he collects, reflecting an uncertainty in him. In contrast, once the mwadhini enters the story, he offers a clarity and simplicity in interpreting the events of a life:
And then today the doctor tells us of this American who was cured of the same disease by a snail. Such a simple cure. Elegant, would you not say? A snail that accomplishes what laboratory capsules cannot. Allah, we reason, must be involved in something so elegant. So you see. These are signs all around us. We must not ignore them (19).
Here, the mwadhini confronts the shell collector with the mindset he himself once had as a child. The shell collector seems to admire this, as the narrator recounts: “His voice bore an astonishing faith, in the slow and beautiful way it trilled sentences, in the way it braided each syllable” (20). The mwadhini’s speech is described with the same care as the shells the collector discovers in the water. Still, the shell collector does not share this faith and only acquiesces to the mwadhini’s request out of fear of his men getting hurt looking for the cone snail and the promise of being left alone.
In tracing the life events of the shell collector, the story at last returns to the Jims’ visit on his island, and the shell collector begins to grapple with these questions of fate and faith. Here, the timing of the story becomes important; it is the month of Ramadan, a period of spiritual growth in Islam. When the shell collector ventures into Lamu with the Jims after sundown, they encounter a teenager on the street who says to them, “Tonight Allah determines the course of the world for the next year” (32). After the shell collector imbibes hashish and enters an altered state of consciousness, the shell collector turns this idea over in his mind: “He thought: God writes next year’s plan for the world on this night. He tried to picture God bent over parchment, dreaming, puzzling through the possibilities” (34). Here, there is no spiraling or twisting—only a higher power, deciding. What’s more, this thought coincides with an event that once again has the power to change the course of his life in a number of ways: He is bitten by the venomous cone snail. The shell collector confronts the possibility of his death, an event that pushes him to look at human connection differently and recognize its value in the context of connections to—and within—the natural world.
Isolation From Humanity
The shell collector experiences and cultivates isolation from the human world, comfortable and at ease surrounded by the natural environment he is so familiar with. Over the course of the narrative, he experiences a transformation.
This story begins with a notable example of the ways in which the shell collector feels closer to the natural environment than to the humans who come in and out of his life, opening with the following passage:
The shell collector was scrubbing limpets at his sink when he heard the water taxi come scraping over the reef. He cringed to hear it—its hull grinding the calices of finger corals and the tiny tubes of pipe organ corals, tearing the flower and fern shapes of soft corals, and damaging shells too: punch holes in olives and murexes and spiny whelks, in Hydantina physis and Turris babylonia (9).
The shell collector’s peaceful day alone with his dog, Tumaini, and his collection is pierced by the Jims, two journalists writing a story about him, and it is clear through the harsh diction of this passage that this interruption is unwelcome. More importantly to the shell collector, this is an intrusion that hurts the organic life of the reef, and he responds to this imagined infliction of harm as though he is a part of that life.
Still, he accepts the men and answers their questions. As he walks them down the path to the reef, he explains, “It’s Ramadan. […] The people don’t eat when the sun is above the horizon. They drink only chai until sundown” (10). Here, the reader understands that it’s not just the journalists who the shell collector feels separated from: He also seems removed from the human world so close by.
As the story delves into the past through flashbacks, following the major events of the shell collector’s life, many moments of intrusion into his solitude are described. When the mwadhini arrives with his brothers, asking for the shell collector’s help, the collector thinks, “How strange it felt to have his home overrun by unseen men” (20). Once word gets out that the cone snail that lives on the shell collector’s shores provides a miracle cure to the sick, strangers come from all around, invading his home and pillaging his collection: “Even at night, when he tried stealing down the path with Tumaini, pilgrims rose from the sand and followed him—unseen hands sifting quietly through his collecting bucket” (23).
The shell collector expresses his desire for solitude explicitly to the mwadhini, saying to him, “I want only to be left alone” (21). But it is only when the shell collector’s son, Josh, dies of a cone snail bite that the outsiders stop coming. “Well, you will have your peace now. No one will come looking for miracles now” (31), the mwadhini says.
When the Jims arrive on the shore, the shell collector greets them with a reluctance grown from years of intrusions, but this visit also comes after a tragic loss. Near the end of the story, when the shell collector has been bitten by the lethal cone snail, his isolation is described in a new light: “What he must have felt, what awful, frigid loneliness” (36). Here, the narration seems to address the reader directly for only the second time in the story, underscoring the importance of the moment.
The story ends one year after this bite, after the shell collector has been nursed back to health by Seema, the girl he saved years before. Here, his wonder for the natural world is still intact, and the reader learns that Seema is now a frequent companion of his. It is notable that in the last scene, the two characters do not share a moment together; rather, they are both content on their own, each unbothered by the other. The narration enters Seema’s point of view briefly here: “Her hair, usually bound back, hung across her neck and reflected the sun. What comfort it was to be with a person who could not see, who did not care anyway” (38). Likewise, the shell collector is back to his usual activities, and in the final moment, his parallel relationship with the natural life around him is highlighted once more: “Beneath his feet the snail kept on, feeling its way forward, dragging the house of its shell, fitting its body to the sand, to the private unlit horizons that whorled around in it” (39).
Related Titles
By Anthony Doerr
