67 pages • 2 hours read
It Ends with Us
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Symbols & Motifs
Plants
The novel makes a strong connection between Lily and Atlas and plants. Lily’s early conversation with Ryle underscores her connection to flowers when she humorously points out that her name, Lily Blossom Bloom, makes her passion for flowers seem inauthentic. Lily’s attachment to plants comes from how she feels that plants reward the care that is given them. “Plants,” Lily tells Atlas, “reward you based on the amount of love you show them” (105). Like plants, Lily rewards Atlas with her love for all the care that he showed her in the past and the care that he continues to show her during her situation with Ryle by reaching out to him at the end.
Atlas himself has responded to Lily with enduring love out of the care that she showed him. Beyond that, Lily offers another view of plants: that while some plants need a lot of nurturing, some can thrive “just relying on themselves and nobody else” (106). Cast out from his family and home, Atlas drives himself forward, accepting Lily’s help and then joining the Marines, resolving to make a life for himself that he can one day offer her. His success with his restaurants shows that he resembles that tree who has flourished by relying on just himself.
Gifts
The gifts Atlas gives Lily emphasize the reciprocity between them and their enduring bond as his circumstances change. At first, this reciprocity is about repayment. The first gift Atlas gives Lily is a set of gardening tools in return for her giving him food, clothing, and letting him shower at her house. As their relationship deepens, the gifts Atlas gives Lily are symbolic of his feelings towards her, feelings that she shares. He carves her a heart out of a branch from an oak tree in her backyard, the top of which has an open space. Lily will eventually have the idiosyncratic shape of the heart tattooed onto her collarbone, demonstrating Atlas’s impact on her. She finds that the image of the heart describes the lack of closure she feels with respect to him, how she feels that her heart has “a little hole in it, letting out all the air” (218), due to how they were forced to separate. Atlas, too, will broach how he feels things incomplete between them because he cannot give her what he thinks she deserves.
The gifts Atlas gives Lily come to symbolize the endurance of their feelings and the promise of a future together, even as they are separated. During their last meeting, when Atlas returns for her birthday Atlas gives Lily a magnet that reads “Boston...Where everything is better” (215). Lily will move to Boston to see whether this is true and finds success with her flower shop, while keeping the magnet as a reminder. Atlas himself will keep a reminder of Lily by calling his restaurant “Better in Boston” as an homage to her. The final gift Atlas gives Lily, Ellen DeGeneres’s book Seriously...I’m Kidding recalls how they both bonded over watching her talk show as teens. The fact that the book is autographed by the famous comedian and addressed to Lily gestures to Atlas’s changed circumstances, and the future that he longs to offer her.
Ellen DeGeneres
The comedian occupies a central position in 15-year old Lily’s life and beyond. During painful periods of her life, Lily has latched onto Ellen DeGeneres as a supportive figure and someone to encourage her during difficult situations. She originally turns to Ellen in her entries, not just because she’s embarrassed at keeping a diary, but because she feels accepted by Ellen, and that Ellen would “love [her] if she got to know [her]” (29). Further, Lily finds encouragement in Ellen’s humor. As Lily finds herself distraught over Ryle’s abuse and her pregnancy, she once again pens an entry to Ellen trying to untangle her complicated feelings.
Ellen is also a figure that brings her and Atlas together. Her show is one of the first instances where they bond. Lily claims, “Every time [Atlas] laughed at your jokes, it made me feel better about sneaking him into my house. Maybe because if he’s actually someone I could be friends with, it’d make me feel less guilty” (63). Lily is suggesting that in Atlas finding the same jokes funny, he is showing that they can be compatible as friends. Later on, as their relationship deepens, Finding Nemo, a movie where Ellen voices one of the characters, gains a special relevance. The quote “just keep swimming” from Ellen’s character, Dory, to the movie’s protagonist will function as encouragement to both of them in their respective struggles. Lily tells this to Atlas as she cares for him while he’s ill. This will be the inscription that Atlas asks Ellen to write in Ellen’s book, a copy of which he will give to Lily. Atlas also writes this quote to Lily on a notepad when she comes to stay over after Ryle hurts her. At the end of the novel, Atlas references Dory again when he tells Lily that she “can stop swimming now” and that “[They] have finally reached the shore” (367), implying that they have overcome their respective obstacles in life.
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