Migrations

“I’m frightened of how simple it was to dive into the water instead of calling for help. My drowning instinct.”

Franny’s “drowning instinct” is the shame she feels about herself, which leads her to treat her life as disposable. While harmful, her disregard for her own safety allows her to save the lives of several other people.

“‘Skipper’s got his heart set on finding the Golden Catch,’ Samuel tells me with a wink.

‘What’s that?’

‘The white whale,’ Samuel says.”

Migration has parallels to the novel Moby Dick by Herman Melville. In Moby Dick, sea captain Ahab is driven to self-destruction and madness by his singular, stubborn desire to kill the white whale. Like Ahab, Ennis is motivated by an obsessive desire to dominate over nature. The phrase “white whale” implies that Ennis’s obsession will be his undoing.

“Thousands of species are dying right now, and being ignored. We are wiping them out. Creatures that have learned to survive anything, everything, except us.”

Migrations criticizes the way humans treat the Earth. Here, Niall spotlights the absurd power dynamic between humans and other animals. Species which have been around long before humanity are being killed off by humanity’s callous indifference and greed.

“And me? I’m no longer the thing with feathers.”

Here, Franny references Emily Dickinson’s poem “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers” to convey her hopelessness. When Franny feels alive and free, she often compares herself to birds; here, she distances herself from them, indicating that she feels defeated and trapped.

“I feel it in the earth, too, when I get out of the car and walk upon the rocks. It’s in the sky and the roaring ocean and the keening of the wind, it’s in the way she strides over her land and into her lighthouse, she owns the place and it owns her, tangible and unarguable. What must it be like to be bound so deeply and willingly to a place?”

For all her wandering, Franny craves the feeling of belonging that comes from setting down roots. She respects the wildernesses she wanders through too much to try to lay claim to any part of them, but this means that she has no place to call her own.

“I don’t have an answer for that. I never worked out how to be relied upon and also free.”

Franny spotlights the dilemma that people like herself and Ennis must contend with, the central source of tension at the heart of the novel: How is one true to themselves without hurting others. Neither she nor Ennis knows the answer to this question, and both have unintentionally left a trail of destruction in their wakes.

“And I remembered how we walked along the rocks until we found the seabird settled among them, its neck broken and wings twisted at violent angles. It had gone simply from my mind, that image, like a light winking out.”

This spotlights Franny’s tendency to suppress traumatic memories. Her rediscovery of a small, unpleasant moment foreshadows the novel’s big reveals: that she has suppressed her mother and Niall’s deaths.

“But I’ll never be free. I wonder if this was how my father felt the day he killed a person.”

Franny worries that she has inherited a destructive and even murderous nature from her father. She’s refers to the destruction she’s left in her wake and the deaths of her mother and Niall, for which she blames herself.

“‘Birds go where the food is,’ Niall says. ‘Birds of the Corvidae family have the ability to recognize individual human faces. Franny became their food source so they had no need to migrate.’”

Niall deconstructs a treasured story from Franny’s childhood in a coldly scientific way. Underlying this small unkindness is his desire to be everything she needs. Niall wants their love to feed her hunger so she will no longer need to wander, though he eventually tries to set her free.

“‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I’d never leave you for good.’ With the words I realize it’s true, and a different kind of binding takes hold, a deeper, more ruinous one.”

Love is a uniquely frightening experience for Franny because she has not had a close bond with anyone since her mother’s death. She has falsely conflated true freedom with the absence of love, and believes that loving Niall will be a form of imprisonment.

“I could walk back into the wooden house by the sea all over again. Call her name all over again. See her body hanging by its neck all over again.”

Franny has suppressed the memory of her mother’s death until this moment. Her mother died by suicide after Franny left for several days, feeding into Franny’s shame about her wandering nature. Franny feels that her essential self is destructive to others, and that she cannot help but cause harm. The above quote uses the technique of repetition, where “all over again” appears three times. This creates a sense of emphasis and focuses the reader on the importance of these lines.

“Whether I leave now or in ten years, I am done here, in this place.”

Franny’s way of coping with grief is to leave in search of a new place. While these flights help her cope with her traumas, they interfere with her ability to form the very bonds which could otherwise help her heal.

“Against all odds, I feel happy with them, and I know I could belong here, on the Saghani, if only in another life.”

Like any migrating animal, Franny craves a community of others who understand her. She finds this aboard the Saghani, with like-minded people who are all unmoored in some way like herself. It’s the first time outside of her marriage that she feels a sense of true belonging. And unlike Niall, her fellow crewmembers share her wandering nature.

“He said our lives mean nothing except as a cycle of regeneration, that we’re incomprehensibly brief sparks, just as the animals are, that we are no more important than they are, no more worthy of life than any living creature. That in our self-importance, in our search for meaning, we have forgotten how to share the planet that gave us life.”

To presume that a human life has more meaning than the life of any other animal is, according to Niall, short-sighted and delusional. To move past this delusion, humans must reconnect with the Earth and learn how to value other creatures as highly as they value themselves.

“When my daughter is born without breath, drowned by my body, part of me goes to sleep. I go in search of something to wake it.”

The recurring motif of water takes on a darker role as the element which drowns Franny’s daughter. This quote spotlights nature’s indifference to humans—both beautiful and tragic things happen as a matter of coincidence. The language Franny uses indicates that she blames herself for the tragedy, even though it was entirely out of her control.

“Saving specific animals purely on the basis of what they offer humanity may be practical, but wasn’t this attitude the problem to begin with? Pure overwhelming, annihilating selfishness? What of the animals that exist purely to exist, because millions of years of evolution have carved them into miraculous being?”

Migrations posits that conservation attempts which take a human-centric perspective are misguided. Animals should be saved because they have as much of a right to be here as humanity, not because they are useful to us.

“‘You think they’ll keep flying, don’t you,’ I say.

Niall nods once, slowly.

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s in their nature.’”

Niall understands that the terns cannot be trained out of migrating, just as Franny can’t be. He respects her autonomy and the coping mechanisms she needs to survive, and won’t try to change her. This acceptance prevents Niall from falling into the common human dilemma of destroying what he loves.

“If they’ve died, all of them, it’s because we’ve made the world impossible for them. So—for my own sanity—I release the Arctic terns from the burden of surviving what they shouldn’t have to, and I bid them goodbye. Then I crawl into the bathroom to vomit.”

Here, Franny decenters her own desires from the reality of the climate crisis. She accepts that it’s just another form of selfishness to expect animals to continue living in a world which humans have destroyed. This also symbolizes how Franny lets go of her delusion that Niall is still alive.

“How is it that such beauty still exists? How could it have survived our destruction?”

In the midst of the Earth’s tragedy, McConaghy includes small moments in which the beauty and sovereignty of nature prevails. These moments give a hopeful nod to nature’s resiliency, even in the face of human-driven destruction.

“‘It’s in your nature,’ Niall says simply. ‘If you could only let go of all this shame, Franny. You should never be ashamed of what you are.’”

Niall loves and understands Franny as she is, a feat Franny herself is not able to accomplish until the novel’s end. Notably, Niall here says “what you are” rather than “who you are,” a subtle difference which captures the way Franny identifies with wild animals.

“It’s the wilderness within that demands I survive.”

Though Franny feels shame and guilt about her inner wildness, her resiliency and connection to the Earth drives her to survive in situations where others would give up.

“But I return the look, and I let him see my own certainty, let him see perhaps a hint of how we don’t always have to be a poison, a plague on the world, of how we can nurture it, too, and slowly something shifts in his eyes.”

Franny provides the optimistic balance to Niall’s pessimism. Through her own deep connection to nature, she knows that it’s possible for humanity to overcome their worst instincts and foster a healthier relationship with the Earth.

“But I’ve nothing left.

There’s still the wild.”

As Franny is about to give up on life, Niall’s spirit visits her to remind her that the persistence of “the wild” makes life worth living. The wild here refers to both the surviving parts of Earth’s wilderness and the untamed core of Franny’s soul.