53 pages • 1 hour read
The Last One at the Wedding
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Symbols & Motifs
UPS
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses violence and death.
Frank Szatowski is a UPS driver and has been so for the entirety of his career. Frank is proud of his working-class identity and strongly feels that, even though he did not attend college, he has been afforded the opportunity to attain financial stability through work that he enjoys. Many mentions are made of Frank’s position at UPS and his work history with the company, and UPS becomes one of the novel’s key motifs: It represents Taking Pride in a Working-Class Identity, one of the text’s most important themes.
Frank is nearing retirement and looks forward to reaping the benefits of his many years of work for UPS. He has put away a sizeable amount in savings and will have a solid pension and continued health care as a retiree. Looking back, he takes pride in his ability to put food on the table, put Maggie through school without her having to incur debt, and set her up in her first apartment when she finished college. He also takes pride in his ability to perform a physically demanding job, even as he enters middle age. He is liked by his supervisors and coworkers and was inducted into a special honors program for long-term employees. Much of his identity derives from his job and his work ethic, and he does not see being working-class as something to overcome. He draws a further point of connection between work and his personal life in that he allows the values that guide his time at UPS to shape his behavior in other areas: He does not shy away from a difficult task, as evidenced by his choice to tackle the spider problem in his cabin alone rather than calling an expensive exterminator. He is happy to make multiple long drives to help various family members and is guided by the same spirit of camaraderie that he and his coworkers display on the job. Although he is proud to be recognized for his hard work and professionalism, he is not motivated by the desire for personal glory. Rather, he seeks to be a helpful member of his family and community.
Batteries
Errol Gardner is the CEO of a tech startup that develops new kinds of batteries. Batteries in the text symbolize The Corrupting Influence of Wealth, as they give the Gardners and Maggie a lucrative lifestyle while causing direct harm to others.
Rekulak explores the wide harm that the batteries cause when the narrative shares details about Hugo’s backstory. Since the company’s batteries require cobalt, a chemical element found in the earth’s crust and mostly mined in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, their company sponsors cobalt mining. This mining is infamously linked to human rights violations and exploitation of miners. The Gardners therefore directly profit from the suffering of others when they sell their batteries.
Near the end, it is revealed that Catherine threw a battery at Dawn’s head and murdered her. This links the murder to the privilege that Catherine has been endowed with by Capaciti and its human rights violations. The battery as a weapon also suggests that her privilege has made Catherine feel invincible enough in the eyes of the law to be violent directly and not just outsource violence on foreign shores.
Spiders
Spiders are one of The Last One at the Wedding’s most horror-like symbols. They help create an atmosphere of fear and suspense within the story and foreshadow the presence of danger at Osprey Cove. Frank encounters what he thinks might be a discarded wig in one of the closets of his cabin on the weekend of the wedding but is horrified to discover that it is actually a large nest of spiders. Frank already has a gut feeling that something is amiss. The spiders become a graphic, visual embodiment of Frank’s inner fears, and they foreshadow the gruesome events that will happen during the weekend of the wedding. Frank refuses to call an exterminator and chooses to kill the spiders himself, but he is not able to rid the cabin of them entirely. At key moments in the text during heightened periods of tension and fraught encounters, the spiders resurface. They are always lurking, waiting to be discovered, and in this regard, they symbolize Frank’s anxiety itself: The spiders remain in the cabin despite Frank’s best efforts to kill them just as his fear remains just below the surface in spite of various characters’ efforts to convince Frank that nothing is amiss at Osprey Cove or with his daughter Maggie.
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