Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab Literary Elements

Biographical novel, Fiction.

The settings of the novel include Canada and Trinidad.

The novel has been narrated from Jonathan and Sydney's point of views.

Skeptical, Grave, Critical.

The protagonist of the novel is Jonathan Lewis Adey who has been abandoned by his lesbian parents.

The major conflict in the novel is between Jonathan and his parents. His parents left him when he was a child and they continued their lives with their loved ones. Jonathan tries to forgive them but he couldn't. Another major conflict in the novel is the identity of Jonathan's mother. She transitioned herself and changed her named from Sid to Sydney along with her gender.

The climax comes in the story when Sid changes her identity.

The title of the novel foreshadows the complexity of life and characters in the novel.

The understatement in the novel is that children suffer the most, when parents get divorced.

There are allusions to abandonment, gender, divorce, lesbian relations, motherhood, childhood and death.

There are images of abandonment, cold weather, illness, childhood, human sufferings and loneliness in the novel.

The paradox in the novel is that Sid leaves her child and transitions herself as a male and after years, she comes back to explain her situation. Although she is man but she still shows motherly feelings and love to her child. There is a paradox in the title of the novel as well i.e. moving forward and sideways. A person can either move forward or move sideways.

There is a parallelism between Jonathan's questions regarding the decisions of her mother and Sydney's answers related to her identity.

An example of synecdoche is 'house' which represents family. Jonathan is an example of metonymy because he stands for all children who are abandoned by their parents.

Decisions, weather and identity have been personified in the novel.