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Symbols are objects, characters, figures, and colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.
Dollhouses
Mr. Harvey builds elaborate dollhouses, imaginary versions of perfect houses, as a hobby. However, just as the dollhouses project an idyllic image, so, too, does Mr. Harvey project a façade of normalcy to his neighbors. Mr. Harvey’s constructions are a potent and ironic symbol of his inability to build a functional and nurturing home. Like the hole he digs in the cornfield to murder Susie—another kind of dollhouse where the two enact a violent parody of love—Harvey’s dollhouses offer only a superficial model of what happiness, love, and care mean. The novel contains a variety of objects (or places) that are akin to these dollhouses—the snow globe, the ships in bottles, the piece of amber with the trapped fly, and even heaven itself—that underscore the ways in which curated visions of perfection can prove lonely and even lethally limiting.
Susie's Camera
Susie receives a camera for her 11th birthday, which allows her to surveil her neighbors in a way that anticipates the way in which Harvey will eventually stalk and hunt her. She enjoys the power that the camera grants her over others, her ability to watch them and put them into poses. In spite of this parallel through the symbol of the camera, the crucial difference between the two characters is, of course, that Susie’s aim is to capture a moment in time, while Harvey wants to extinguish the ability of women and girls to experience time entirely. Susie shoots so many rolls of film that her family is still developing them long after her death, allowing them to see the world through her eyes almost a decade after her murder. Looking at them, Jack falls in love with a distant Abigail again, wondering if he was to blame for the mask she came to wear with her family. Not only does Susie take a picture of her mother that shows her as almost a stranger, but she also snaps the best picture of her father ever taken.
The camera’s snapshots also provide the structure for one of the novel’s key chapters, suggesting that the way this form of popular photography records the temporal structure of modern life is important to how the novel is written.
The Sinkhole
The sinkhole near Norristown, where residents discard things they no longer want, is an important symbol of perversion and evil. The sinkhole shows that even the ground, normally a symbol of stability, is not always what it seems. It might be fun to watch something disappear into the sinkhole, as when the Salmons push an old refrigerator into it, but this is an amusement like going to a horror film—it is entertaining because the danger is contained. Susie even creates an imaginary world for Buckley inside the sinkhole, where the residents greet their refrigerator with enthusiasm. But when Harvey uses the sinkhole to dispose of Susie’s dismembered corpse, the novel makes clear that danger cannot always be contained or controlled. The parallel between the sinkhole and the human body, which has a mouth and a throat that burps, is key to Ruth and Ray’s subsequent discussions about it. Using her powers to find dead women and girls, Ruth correctly suggests to Ray, a doctor in training, that Susie is lost inside the sinkhole. While the sinkhole is an actual place in the novel, it also symbolically represents the way that sorrow can consume a person or a family.
