Notebook Symbol Analysis

In Once, Felix’s notebook represents his love of escapist stories, a love that evolves as Felix slowly realizes stories are not a replacement for reality but a tool to shape reality. Felix’s parents gave him the notebook before leaving him at a remote orphanage in Nazi-occupied Poland, pretending that they needed to travel to save their business when in fact they were hiding Felix from the Nazis. In the notebook, Felix loves writing stories about his parents’ imagined adventures. Felix’s relationship to the notebook changes dramatically throughout the novel. He rejects the notebook when he realizes that his parents concealed the horrors of Nazi-occupied Poland from him. When the Jewish dentist Barney, who has been hiding Jewish children from the Nazis, assumes responsibility for Felix and asks whether he can read Felix’s notebook stories to the other children, Felix refuses. He has decided his notebook stories are “stupid” because the escapist adventures he imagined for his parents in no way capture their oppressed, endangered reality. Stories, he concludes, hide ugly truths. Yet when Barney asks Felix to tell Barney’s dental patients stories to distract them from their dental surgeries, the experience makes Felix realize that escapism helps people endure unavoidable pain. The notebook, Felix sees, is a useful tool. Finally, when Nazis put Felix on a train to a concentration camp, Felix tears up his notebook to create makeshift toilet paper for the other passengers—and, while making the paper available to all, discovers a rotten section of the train through which passengers can escape. Felix’s final destruction of the notebook to help others—and the possibility of survival it reveals—shows that fiction and escapism are tools that must be employed or cast aside as real situations dictate, not a replacement for attention to harsh reality.