Little Bee

Part of Charlie’s desire to be called “Batman” is his desire to stay in his costume, which he refuses to take off. That costume grants him confidence. For Sarah, that costume is the same as her using her “husband’s surname” or Little Bee clinging “to the name she had taken in a time of terror” (21). Names, titles, and costumes all serve as masks to grant a new kind of power and safety from harm.

The mask reappears when Sarah wades into the Thames to seek Charlie. Where she is used to looking at Charlie through the eyeholes of his Batman mask, she ends up carrying a mask, feeling “the breeze [that] was whistling through the empty eyeholes of the mask” (237), and that mask represents her own mask that she uses just as she knows Charlie uses his. Facing their own protective armor causes characters to face their emotions, but they gain power and freedom from doing so. Charlie, when he removes his Batman costume, plays freely in the surf with the other children.

Little Bee wears multiple costumes throughout the novel: her mismatched, boyish clothes in the detention center; Sarah’s frilly lace dress, which she wears even when transported to Heathrow.