91 pages • 3 hours read
Jeff ZentnerGoodbye Days
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Symbols & Motifs
Art
The creative arts are a motif that appears throughout the entire book. All of the Sauce Crew boys attended Nashville Arts Academy, and each had a unique talent (comedy for Blake, drawing for Mars, music for Eli, writing for Carver). The author’s decision to give each of the boys a creative talent is useful in allowing the deceased members of Sauce Crew to “live on” after their death. For example, Blake’s YouTube fart pranks are such a defining part of his character that Nana Betsy pulls a fart prank of her own as a farewell video for Blake’s YouTube channel. In a way, Blake, through his art, lives on. Mars’s drawings serve a similar purpose, and his graphic novel The Judge serves the valuable purpose of allowing the character to communicate, even after death, that his father inspired him.
Meanwhile, Eli’s musicality lives on through Jesmyn. The two characters bonded over music, and her ambitions (attending Juilliard) parallel Eli’s (attending the Berklee College of Music). A tangible example of how each of the boys is represented by their art is seen in Eli’s case when his family scatters sand from a sand sculpture he made as a kid at the waterfalls. His mother explains, “This is one of the first things Eli ever made for me in preschool. It contains his creative energy” (264). This quote testifies to the book’s argument that people can live on after death through the art they create.
Carver’s Storytelling
Carver’s art is writing. After the death of his friends, he finds himself unable to create new stories. It’s only after he tells the true story of the accident, one that logically presents his role in the event without claiming the blame, that he can unburden himself and conquer his writer’s block. Carver’s storytelling thus represents his emotional evolution throughout the book. His storytelling also supports the idea that people can live on after death through what they create. Carver’s character brings Sauce Crew to life through the stories he tells the reader about them, in flashbacks, dreams, and imaginary conversations. Carver proves the epigraph prefacing the book, a line by the author Jim Harrison: “Death steals everything except our stories.”
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