A Spark of Light

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2018

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-9

Chapter 10-Epilogue

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Chapter 10-EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 10 Summary: “Eight a.m.”

Wren makes her father a pancake breakfast, and they banter after she sings “Happy Birthday.” She is nervous because she is going to the Center today to get birth control pills, as she discussed with her boyfriend, Ryan. She doesn’t want to tell her dad and thinks that this is part of her birthday gift for him—to let him think of her as a little girl for a while longer. Hugh wonders if this is the peak of his life now that he has hit 40. Bex calls and wishes him a happy birthday.

Janine wakes up, says a prayer for the child she never had, and then puts on a blonde wig. She hopes that she can make a difference in even one woman’s life.

Olive lies in bed, looking at Peg. She thinks about telling her about the cancer diagnosis but decides to let them live in happiness for a little longer.

Joy wakes up early after dreaming of holding a baby boy in a blue blanket. She had the same dream the night before she took her pregnancy test. She gets a rideshare to the Center and has him let her out a few blocks early. The driver circles back and tells her that she forgot something and holds out a blue blanket like the one in her dreams. She tells him that it is not hers and keeps walking.

Izzy is tired after working the night shift but is still making the drive to Jackson. She traded shifts with her coworker, Jayla, so that she could schedule an abortion. She believes that she and Parker are too different and that she will not be a good mother.

Louie gets to the airport early and sees Allen holding a protest sign. He is used to this greeting but is early for his appointments, so he invites Allen to have a meal with him. They debate the ethics of Louie’s career. Louie claims that there has to be a difference, morally, between cutting down an oak and squashing an acorn. Allen tells him that he is a difficult man to hate.

Beth takes abortion pills that she ordered online. She tried to obtain an abortion legally, but when she filed a parental consent waiver, the judge in her case went on an unexpected vacation, so she is out of time. Locked in her bathroom, she begins to hemorrhage and lose consciousness. The last thing she sees is her father breaking down the door.

George parks illegally in a fire lane and carries his unconscious daughter, Lil, into the hospital. The nurse asks her name, and he says it’s Elizabeth Goddard. When she was small, he called her “Lil Bit,” and only the first part of the name stuck. Everyone else calls her Beth.

Bex is alone in her studio, planning her newest artwork. She opens a secret compartment in her painting room where she keeps a few mementos. One of them is a photograph of her as a 14-year-old, lying in a hospital bed holding newborn Hugh. Her mother was a devout Catholic and convinced her to keep the baby and allow her parents to raise him as her brother. Bex has never told Hugh the truth and only allows herself to regret her decisions on this day. She thinks that she lost a life—her own—but gained Hugh and Wren and all the lives that Hugh has saved. Still, she sometimes wonders if she made the right choice.

Epilogue Summary: “Six p.m.”

The narrative returns to 6:00 pm, the moment the first chapter ended. Wren briefly hugs her father, who urges her to leave the Center. She holds on for a moment, unwilling to leave and thinking about how much she loves him. On her way to the tent, she hears her father tell George to think of his own daughter and George responding that Hugh will never understand. Wren feels a sense of foreboding and turns to see George firing at her father.

As the television cameras record it, Hugh shoots George before he can hurt Wren. Wren has always thought of her father as a hero, but now she realizes that adulthood involves making decisions, sometimes even terrible ones. As she and her father leave, she tears down a protest sign off the clinic’s fence that reads, “It’s a child, not a choice” (356). All that is left is the word “choice.” Years later, she does not remember doing this, but she does remember that leaving the clinic was the first time she held her father’s hand, “instead of the other way around” (356).

Chapter 10-Epilogue Analysis

In the novel’s final chapter, Picoult unveils several important revelations that underline both the Personal and Societal Impacts of Abortion as well as The Role of Empathy in Understanding Contentious Issues. One is that Izzy is not an employee of the clinic but a nurse at a different hospital and that she is there to terminate her own pregnancy. The other is that Bex had an unwanted pregnancy as a 14-year-old that resulted in the birth of Hugh and that she has been hiding this secret for her whole life. These reveals change how readers view the motivations and actions of these characters and give the final chapter a sense of surprise and closure. In the Epilogue, Picoult returns to the end of the hostage standoff and reveals that Hugh and Wren survived the attack. In the final sentences, she reaches into the future, where an adult Wren tells the story of what happened. Notably, what Wren remembers is not the details of the trauma (“if her aunt’s blood had spilled on tile or carpet”) but the fact that as they left, “it was the first time she held [her father’s] hand, instead of the other way around” (356). This final image emphasizes the love that the two of them share and how it has survived their ordeal. It also represents Wren’s coming of age as an adult who has navigated a difficult situation.

The final chapter also offers a deeper glimpse into Hugh and his motivations. Readers learn that he worries that his life has not been very useful or exciting. He thinks, “Sure, he had made a difference in the lives of individuals, given his career,” but that “didn’t keep the individual daily chain of one’s life from feeling, well, mundane” (334). With knowledge of the day’s events, it is evident that Hugh has made a difference—not just in surviving the shooting but in his parenting of Wren. In the context of The Complexity of the Father-Daughter Relationship, George offers an example of protective fatherhood gone wrong, and we see the impact that Hugh has as a healthy example of parental love.

The motif of the spark of light appears in the book’s final sections, this time from the point of view of Louie, who is reading a medical journal. He learns about a study that shows that eggs that will be successfully fertilized glow more brightly, which means that life begins with light. He thinks about the patients who have told him about near-death experiences and envisioning the afterlife in light as well. He sees these as a marriage of science and faith: “Science never failed to humble him, just as much as his faith, and he unequivocally believed that the two could exist side by side” (342). For Louie, light represents hope and love in the form of God, as well as the intricacies of science. His character exemplifies a religious man whose unconventional path is motivated by this spark of faith and love.

Finally, Bex reflects on her art and the function of vision. She thinks about how humans focus on one part of a picture and sometimes lose sight of others. This is true in her art, which functions as a symbol of this insight, as well as in politically charged issues like abortion, where debates over larger issues might obscure the reality of people’s stories. Bex imagines a new piece of art that she will begin, of a fetus. In the white space around the image, “you would see the optical illusion of a profile. And if you looked closely, you’d know it was hers” (347-48). For Bex, the secret of Hugh’s birth is the kind of absence that her whole life has been shaped around. While she loves him and Wren, she also recognizes that her pregnancy brought loss as well. She imagines someone finding the photograph of her holding the infant Hugh after she died and wonders if they would think it was “a tragedy or a love story. It could, Bex [knows], be both at once” (349). Like many of the narrative threads in A Spark of Light, Bex’s story illustrates the complexity of human lives that can be obscured by a hyperfocus on talking points. She is able to embody both joy and pain, and Picoult uses her to remind readers that neither abortion nor birth is a simple, one-issue decision.