Song for a Whale

Parallels between Blue 55’s experience and Iris’s are central to the novel. The frequency of Blue 55’s song and its unique patterning mean that no other whales can understand or communicate with him, including his own parents. Likewise, Iris’s deafness in a hearing school and a hearing family put her in a similar predicament. When Iris, who has spent two years in her school but still feels like the new girl, hears about the whale’s “swimming around for all those years, unable to communicate with anyone” (14), she can painfully relate to the whale’s experience. Until Andi sets her straight, she even imagines that Blue 55 might be deaf like her. While this isn’t the case, the chapters written from Blue 55’s perspective reveal that he has all the feelings of loneliness that Iris projects onto him. For example, just as Iris experiences people talking past her, as though she’s not there, the whale finds that his peers “communicated to one another past him, through him, across him. Like he was a coral reef or a kelp forest they passed by” (16). However, a crucial difference between the two is that Blue 55 wishes he were different and could communicate exactly like the other whales in the pods that pass him by, while Iris is comfortable in her deafness and expresses no wish to hear.