All the Bright Places: Motifs

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Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.

Colors

Colors appear throughout the book to signify moods and to symbolize characters. Violet’s very name is a color, one that Finch amends to Ultraviolet as he gets to know her better. Though Niven does not state it in the book, she does leave an Easter egg within the text in the form of NYU, Violet’s school of choice. The school’s colors are purple and white, and their competitive teams are known as the Violets.

Some of the colors in Finch’s environment, like the colors he sees when he suffers from migraines, are beyond his control, so he uses color purposefully in an attempt to calm his mood or control his thoughts. When he changes the color of his room from red to blue, it takes several coats to keep the red from bleeding through, which suggests just how difficult it is for him to exert control over himself. His initial decision to leave the ceiling white since white is all the colors at once suggests that he is leaving his options open, and when he eventually paints it blue as well it appears that he would rather be safe than sorry. When Violet chooses blue for her layer on the World’s Largest Ball of Paint, her homage to Finch places him in control once more.

Birds

Birds are a symbol of freedom, and while Finch did not choose his bird-like last name, his decision to go by it in lieu of the name his parents chose for him is an attempt to free himself from his toxic family dynamic. His fear that his mother will use the story of the cardinal against him as an example of his sensitivity suggests that he will never be free from her misguided opinions about him, but he still shares the tale with Violet as a way of opening up to her. When skipping school together, Finch and Violet delight in watching a rare hooded crane splash in the water. Its appearance precedes an unwelcome interruption from their peers, illustrating how rare it is for them to be able to carve out a moment together and be free from others’ judgments.

Troubled Female Authors

Violet and Finch’s shared affinity for troubled female authors highlights both their shared anguish and their shared hopefulness about each other. Violet’s response to Finch’s first volley of a quote from Virginia Woolf gives him his first glimmer of hope, and the smile that he imagines she flashes him after another quote temporarily gives him the courage to press on. When he seeks solace in the Woolf’s words while he is alone in the bathtub, his anguish is on display. Violet uses a quote to assuage her own longing and worry for Finch when she is at NYU.

Violet, herself a troubled female writer, keeps her own words at bay while she grieves the death of her sister, but she does indulge in the works of the Brontë sisters. The words of Emily Brontë give voice to an anger that she is not ready to vocalize herself, but by the time Violet finally creates Germ, she has begun to give voice to all of her emotions and provide a space for other female writers to do the same.