Before the Fall

“Everyone has their path. The choices they've made. How any two people end up in the same place at the same time is a mystery.”

At the very start, Hawley introduces an idea he explores throughout the narrative: how fate dictates our lives. Scott nearly misses the flight which lands him in the Atlantic, swimming for his life. Life, Hawley suggests, is a branching tree of possibilities and outcomes, each one dependent on a single, previous choice. For Scott, contemplating the what-ifs too deeply is counterproductive. Rather, he chooses to accept his role and his choices and embrace the place where life has left him.

“It is the ocean he is painting tonight, stroke by stroke, like Harold and his purple crayon, drawing a balloon as he falls.”

Hawley draws a parallel between Scott’s art and his current circumstances, alluding to a famous children’s book in which a boy uses art to create his life, moment-by-moment. Similarly, Scott must use the physical act of brushstrokes/swimming strokes to create a reality in which he saves both his life and JJ’s. Later, he uses his literal art to save himself emotionally and psychologically.

“What happens when your life can't be translated into a linear narrative?”

As Scott tries to answer Gus’s questions, he is unable to construct a linear timeline of events. Instead, his memory is a series of scattered images in no particular order, “fireflies firing at random” (48). The memory lapses are unsettling since we measure time in a linear fashion and assume our memories are simply mental recordings of events as they happen.