The Pelican Brief

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2006

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-9

Chapters 10-18

Chapters 19-27

Chapters 28-36

Chapters 37-45

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Pelicans

Pelicans become symbols of the broader fight for the environment in The Pelican Brief. The brown pelicans of the Louisiana wetlands are an endangered species. When Victor Mattiece tries to drill for oil in their nesting grounds, environmentalist lawyers turn the recognizable pelicans into a symbol of the entire marshland. Most people do not care about swamps, but they do respond to pelicans, whose size, unique shape, and association with the coastline make them iconic and sympathetic. The oil company has no corresponding way to defend itself. The pelicans become representatives of the wider battle for a clean environment.

The pelican gets another meaning as the nickname of Darby’s brief. Just like the pelicans, the person who wrote the brief and the people who read it find themselves in clear danger. Just Mattiece and his henchmen target the pelicans, so too do they target Darby. The plight of the pelicans echoes Darby’s efforts to bring justice to an amoral and uncaring world. Darby becomes like an endangered species, battling an enemy with seemingly unlimited resources simply to stay alive. The battle between the oil company capitalists and the world they want to trample is embodied in the actual pelicans that inhabit the wetlands and in the woman who writes the pelican brief that outlines their crimes.

Lawsuits

Lawsuits symbolize the disparity in resources between rich and poor people, as well as the immoral way in which the law protects the people with the most money. To lay people like Grantham, a lawsuit can be difficult to understand. The full ramifications of a case are not always apparent, so they can mask true intentions. As Darby explains to Grantham, Mattiece’s legal team won the first lawsuit the environmentalists brought, but expects many appeals and countersuits to follow. Rather than a single lawsuit, the pelican brief concerns a tangled web of opaque, interlocking lawsuits purposefully designed to obfuscate the truth and waste the time and money of resource-poor environmentalists. The deliberately complicated nature of the legal system allows men like Mattiece to plunder the environment for billions.

Lawsuits can also silence people. When Grantham has written his story, he calls the law firm used by Mattiece and asks them for comment. They threaten to sue him and the newspaper to block the story from coming out. They know that they are in the wrong, but use the threat of the lawsuit to protect themselves from recrimination, silence Grantham, and intimidate the newspaper. For men like Mattiece, such lawsuits are a cost of doing business. For the people on the other side of the lawsuit, the consequences are an existentialist threat.

Clothing

Clothing is a recurring motif throughout The Pelican Brief. When Darby first goes on the run, for example, she changes her clothes often. She purchases cheap clothes and throws them away after a few days, each time with a pang of regret that she is becoming more deeply entangled in the conspiracy. Each disposable outfit is a disposable identity, changed so often that she barely recognizes herself. At the end of the novel, when Darby is finally safe, she purchases long-term clothes to wear on the beach. The clothes are no longer disposable; they are her new, fixed identity. Darby’s final change of clothes represents her leaving her old self in the past. She is a new, more mature, more jaded person, but she hopes that she will never need to change her outfit or her identity again.

For the lawyers working in the high-powered law firms, suits are a kind of uniform, a way of conforming to social expectations. Men like Curtis Morgan wear expensive suits and do as they are told, while being paid large amounts of money to compromise their morals. The suits’ sameness—they are so similar that picking out an individual in a crowd is almost impossible—show how individuals become part of the corrupt legal machine. When Morgan confesses the firm’s crimes, he records his final statement without a suit jacket and a tie. He sheds his legal armor when trying to reclaim his morality.

When Barr meets Mattiece, Mattiece’s clothing demonstrates lost sanity. Mattiece wears only white clothes and insists that everyone remove their shoes. He is no longer operating within society’s constraints. His odd, distinctive choice of clothing represents the extent to which Mattiece has separated himself from the rest of society and now does whatever he wants, regardless of morality, money, or expectations.