A family tree (symbol)
A family tree is a symbol of a life. According to Del, “nobody in our family had done anything remarkable”. Some of them “had married” and had “large families”. Some “did not marry”. Some of the children “died young”. Four in one family “were buried in a fire”. One man “lost two views in childbirth”. One “married a Roman Catholic”. To Uncle Craig it seemed “necessary that the names of all these people, their connections with each other, the three large dates of birth and marriage and death, or the two of birth and death if that was all that happened to them, be discovered”. In such a way, a family tree becomes a symbol of a life of an ordinary person, the sign that they did live, love and then die.
Transplantation (allegory)
Transplantation is an allegory of immortality. Ada says that in the future “they’ll be able to transplant hearts and lungs and all the organs that the body needs”. So “all these parts won’t die at all, they’ll go on living as a part of somebody else”. Then you “won’t be able properly to speak of death at all”. We will all be “heirs of one another’s bodies”. Death, as we know it now, “would be done away with.”
Understanding (motif)
Della struggles to understand the world around and herself, for it is important for her questioning nature. She often complains that it is next to impossible to see eye to eye with her mother, but the latter just tries to open her daughter’s eyes “for her own good”. Every story describes Jubilee as a hopeless place, where the society lives according to its own rules and to stand out means to be an outcast. Ada understands this perfectly well, for she has never been accepted, so she tries to persuade her daughter to not miss her chance to leave. She asks whether Del would “want you live in Jubilee all your life”, as if a life there is a death sentence. “I can’t understand it,” she says. “I think you must have softening of the brain” to prefer such a desperate place to the world of opportunities. It takes Del some time to agree with her.
