A Spool of Blue Thread

The spool of blue thread, from which the book’s title takes its name, represents connection. After Abby Whitshank’s death, her son Denny looks for thread to repair his father’s shirt. The exact color of thread needed falls into his hands, unsettling him: “I almost imagined that she was handing it to me. Like some kind of, like, secret sign” (456). Denny suggests that his mother reached out to him from the afterlife as a symbol of forgiveness. Abby, therefore, represents a connection that’s threaded through her family’s lives, both in life and in death. Thread itself is an item that binds things together, and the image of blue threads mirrors blue blood as it courses through one’s veins, illustrating a literal idea of familial ties. 

The Whitshanks’ house on Bouton Road is often described in anthropomorphic terms. In Chapter 3, for instance, Red mentions that “the heart goes out of it” (92) when houses are left idle. The house symbolizes the family’s desire to be stable and well-built, like a house. It’s also symbolic of the family’s togetherness as a cohesive unit. The house can also be viewed as the largest ghost in the narrative, a behemoth haunting the family with each new generation. When the house is finally put up for sale, the Whitshanks have begun to free themselves of the house’s hold.