Star-Shaped Scar (Symbol)
The scar on Jasmine's forehead symbolizes her "third eye," or her potential for sage-like intuition. The idea is that through pain (the scar is from an injury) Jasmine may be able to glean more about the reality of her situation than she might otherwise have, if she had not experienced the pain. The fact that the scar is shaped like a star symbolizes her potential to have astrological intuition.
Dog Carcass (Recurring Symbol)
The dog carcass that appears in Chapter 1 serves as a symbol of how refugees and people seeking asylum can be cruelly cast aside by society and left to rot. The symbol returns as a motif, recalled by Jasmine in situations where she feels like she's approaching a symbolic representation of that image and odor that haunts her memories.
The Cracked Jug (Motif)
The image of the cracked jug returns over and over again as a motif to challenge the superficialities and preoccupations of the people in Jasmine's life. She uses the cracked jug to explicate Vimla's actions after her husband dies, Mother Ripplemeyer's vanity, and her father's obsessive nostalgia for his life in Lahore. Her father would constantly denigrate Hasnapur, comparing it to the high culture of Lahore. She says, "Fact is, there was a difference. My father was right to notice it and to let it set a standard. But that pitcher is broken. It is the same air this side as that. He’ll never see Lahore again and I never have. Only a fool would let it rule his life" (43).
Paradise Bay Complex (Symbol)
A land developer purchases Lillian Gordon's home in south Florida as well as the abandoned motel where Half-Face rapes her after they make landfall. Jasmine says, "It is by now only a passing wave of nausea, this response to the speed of transformation, the fluidity of American character and the American landscape. I feel at times like a stone hurtling through diaphanous mist, unable to grab hold, unable to slow myself, yet unwilling to abandon the ride I’m on. Down and down I go, where I’ll stop, God only knows" (138-139). Paradise Bay Complex symbolizes the way capitalism and land development steamrolls over trauma.
Flushing (Symbol)
Jasmine describes her drive into Queens: "We took the bridge into Queens. On the streets I saw only more greed, more people like myself. New York was an archipelago of ghettos seething with aliens" (140). When Jasmine arrives in New York, she's confronted with a level of contact and casual impropriety in Manhattan that she's totally unprepared for. But as she enters Queens she observes that many of the cities neighborhoods are concentrations of foreign ethnicities and nationalities. Thus Vedhera's neighborhood in Flushing resembles, to her, a mini Punjab, and her time in Flushing represents a time of stalling and arrested development. She feels like she has to leave in order to fully acclimate to American culture.
