Mrs. Tomelty’s Unicorn Symbol Analysis

Mrs. Tomelty’s unicorn figurine is an unusual and ambiguous item in Old God’s Time that symbolizes dreams and unreality. Although the statue only appears twice in the novel in seemingly unrelated scenes, its presence serves as an important clue to the reader as to whether what Tom is experiencing is real or not. Tom first encounters the unicorn when visiting Mr. and Mrs. Tomelty in their flat, where the latter especially spends a great deal of time talking to Tom. However, later in the novel, Tom speaks to Mr. Tomelty and discovers that Mrs. Tomelty has been dead for many years, revealing that this encounter was either a ghostly phenomenon or a hallucination borne of Tom’s failing mind (or perhaps even both).

The figurine does not appear again until the very last chapter, when Tom sees it on the beach while pursuing Mr. McNulty during his abduction of Jesse. Unlike its appearance in the Tomeltys’ flat, where a figurine is a perfectly normal thing to have, the unicorn’s presence in this moment is extremely bizarre and goes completely unexplained within the narrative. It is worth noting that the following events—Tom’s killing of Mr. McNulty and the subsequent lack of response from authorities, his sublime swim in the channel, and June’s ghostly visit—all have an exceptionally dreamlike quality to them. Given that the unicorn first appears in a scene confirmed to be unreal, this dreaminess combined with the unicorn’s second appearance suggests the possibility that the ending events of the novel are a dream—and, given Tom’s reunion with June at the end of the novel, may in fact be Tom’s dying dream. In essence, the unicorn figure introduces ambiguity and unreality into the novel, casting doubt on what is real and what is imagined.