Slowy the Turtle Symbol Analysis

Alby Pinto’s slow-moving turtle—aptly named Slowy—comes to represent the slow, messy, and often life-stalling process of grief. During his short life, Alby spends hours each day studying, taking copious notes about Slowy’s each and every move. Alby’s dedication to his turtle actually ends up being the cause of Alby’s death. While Alby is lying in the driveway and observing Slowy, Alby and Cory’s mother, Benedita, backs her car over Alby and crushes him to death. After Alby’s death, Cory begins caring for the turtle, revering it as one of the last remaining vestiges of Alby’s short life on Earth. As Cory cares for Slowy over the years, Slowy comes to symbolize Cory’s struggle to wade through the thick muck of grief. Cory, who had graduated from Princeton and taken a high-profile, high-paying job at a consulting firm in Manila, puts his whole life on hold to return home and nurse his mother through her grief and resulting insanity. At the end of the novel, Cory’s girlfriend-turned-wife, Greer, realizes that the social capital and power she is enjoying now as a successful feminist writer will not last. As she considers this, she imagines how every afternoon for several years, Cory sat alone in his brother’s room with only Slowy for company. She wonders if the turtle will “outlive them all,” as she realizes that the power of grief, pain, and slow acceptance of one’s fate is the only true power in the world.