46 pages • 1 hour read
Kate AllenThe Line Tender
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Sharks
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses the death of a parent and the death of a child.
In The Line Tender, sharks are a symbol of the unknown. Helen remarks in her interview that humans fear sharks because they don’t understand much about them. This holds true for Lucy at the beginning of the novel since she doesn’t want to spend much time around the shark that Sookie caught because it makes her uncomfortable. Similarly, the general population of the town sees the resurgence of the great white shark population as cause for alarm, yet scientists like Helen embrace the rise in shark population because it signals growth. This symbolizes that the unknown causes most people anxiety, but when people embrace the unknown, they often experience personal growth. The characters in The Line Tender who are least afraid of the unknown—Fred, Helen, Vern, and Dr. Robin—are also the characters who are the most curious about sharks. As Lucy becomes more comfortable with the unknown, she also becomes more interested in the shark population. This culminates in the final scene of the novel, where Lucy tags living sharks out on the ocean, demonstrating her character growth.
The Mermaid Pendant
The mermaid pendant is a symbol of Fred’s love for Lucy. After Fred’s death, Lucy finds the pendant in Fred’s backpack; though she doesn’t know for sure, she assumes it was a gift for her and strings it onto some dental floss and wears it as a necklace. This represents that Fred and Lucy knew they were important to each other and that they belonged to one another in a meaningful way, even though they hadn’t confessed these feelings to one another in words. Lucy’s confusion about whether the pendant was truly meant for her represents her confusion about Fred’s feelings and her own feelings for Fred. Later, Mr. Patterson reveals that the pendant belonged to his wife and that Fred picked it out for Lucy to show her that she “was [Fred’s] favorite person in the world, and [he] wanted to tell [her this]” (299). When Fiona gives Lucy a real silver chain for the pendant, Lucy tries to break the dental floss to get the pendant out, and she finds that it is incredibly difficult to break. The strength of the dental floss represents how strong Lucy’s and Fred’s connection is, and the replacement chain represents how Fiona—and other friends—will fill the void that Fred’s death left in Lucy’s life.
The Ocean
In the novel, the ocean is a symbol for death and dying. Helen died from her brain aneurysm while on a boat, and at the beginning of the novel, Lucy is afraid of going out on the open water since she has negative feelings about it. The ocean is the natural habitat of the shark, an animal that symbolizes the unknown in this novel; death in literature is often represented as the ultimate unknown. At the end of the novel, Lucy overcomes her fear of death, demonstrated by the final image of her on a boat in open water, watching the sharks that represent Fred and her mother. The ebb and flow of the ocean’s waves, too, suggest that life and death are part of a natural cycle, which Lucy comes to understand.
The Line Tender
The line tender, a key person in a scuba rescue team, is a symbol in this novel of connection to loved ones who have died. In scuba rescue, the line tender holds the scuba diver’s line, guiding the diver in an arch and acting as the communication between the scuba diver and the other members of the team. During Fred’s rescue, Lucy imagines herself as a second line tender, connecting herself to Fred while the team looks for him. At the end of the summer, Lucy’s father describes Lucy as a line tender since she is always connected to Fred and her mother, even though they are dead.
Survival and Adaptability
Survival and adaptability are motifs in The Line Tender, representing the themes of The Role of Community in Coping With Grief and The Interconnectedness of Humans and Nature. The novel opens with a dead shark and a reference to Lucy’s dead mother, immediately drawing a connection between animal and human survival. The author develops the motif to include emotional survival as Lucy describes her father as “always moving like a shark, moving in order to breathe” (26). Mr. Patterson tells Lucy and her father that they must adapt to survive their grief, which is what he’s had to do after Mrs. Patterson’s death. At the end of the novel, Lucy marvels at animals’ ability to adapt to difficult situations, mirroring her own ability to adapt to Helen’s and Fred’s deaths.
