The Girl’s Book Symbol Analysis

The girl’s favorite book, Swallows and Amazons, represents the comforting, and sometimes terrifying, potential of imagination. The girl keeps the book near her, sleeping next to it and holding it while trying to complete other tasks. She’s read it several times and reenacts its scenes with her friends at school. It’s clearly a source of delight and comfort for her, a world she can return to in her imagination as much as she likes. But her nightmare, in which she discovers an epilogue to the novel that details its characters’ mundane later lives and deaths, casts a sinister light on the book: her imagination has betrayed her. The book is therefore a potent reminder that although imagination can be held in a small, seemingly benign object like a book, it can become an unwieldy and terrifying force. Imagination can inform its bearer of truths they might not have wanted to consider.