Joyland

Linda Gray represents the key to Devin’s leap into adulthood. Murdered by Lane Hardy, she lingers, her ghost trapped in the underworld like Persephone until someone can release her. Devin wants to be the one to do so, as if by grappling with and overcoming death, he can understand life.

In the end, Mike is the one who frees her, showing her the way out. Linda becomes the vehicle through which Mike shows Devin that death is not something to be grappled with or vanquished and that Devin, like Linda, needs to move past the ending of one thing and go on to the next.

Annie is described as an ice queen by Mrs. Shoplaw and her friend, Miss Ackerley, a characterization that aligns with Devin’s description of Annie’s green Victorian house as a castle.

Annie’s inability to let go and move forward is a kind of prison. She has built the tower and locked herself in to protect herself and her son from the inevitable. Even if the walls were able to keep death out, they also prevent life from getting in.

Devin’s task is to free the “queen,” allowing her to take down the walls she erected to keep death from reaching her son. Once Devin has freed Annie from her self-imposed prison, she sleeps with him, gifting him with the symbolic union that represents a transition to adulthood.

Annie would have been about Wendy’s age when she conceived Mike, and she was living a wild life similar to that of Wendy after she dumped Devin. Annie abandoned her wild ways and dropped out of college when she had Mike, but if Mike’s death is to represent Annie’s own coming-of-age, then she has held onto childhood years longer than she should have. Perhaps Mike’s birth pushed her toward adulthood, but she doesn’t make the final leap until she loses him.

Mike represents the archetype of the divine child, characterized by purity, innocence, kindness, redemption, and godlike qualities, including healing. He is both powerful and helpless. Despite his power to help and heal others, Mike is helpless to save himself. Unable to look forward to adulthood, he shows Annie and Devin how to glean the last precious moments of childhood before moving on.

Mike uses his special powers to serve Annie, Linda, Devin, and even Eddie as a psychopomp—an entity or spirit that guides the dead to the afterlife. Mike first leads them to an understanding of death and endings, and then he goes ahead of them, showing them the way to follow when their time comes.

Devin has been seeking Linda in the hope of grasping something beyond his reach, but Mike, not Linda, teaches Devin what he wants to understand. Through Mike, Devin understands that childhood must go, and once it is gone, it is gone completely and irrevocably.

The knowledge that Mike will never see adulthood helps Devin to realize that adulthood, too, is precious. Devin will have the opportunity to experience the precious things about being an adult: love, work, and a life full of the unexpected and the unplanned.

Devin meets Erin and Tom at Joyland. Erin and Tom fall in love, and they embody the relationship Devin wanted to have with Wendy. The older Devin tells the reader that Erin and Tom stay together and in love with each other until Tom’s death.

Tom has a magnetic and fascinating personality that attracts Erin, even though Tom is not conventionally handsome with his stocky frame and round cheeks. He is something of a foil for Devin—less naive and more worldly. It is Tom who tells Devin that he sacrifices too much for other people and that he deserves to receive as well as give. Erin is like a sister to Devin and helps his quest of learning more about Linda Gray by doing research.

Tom is the first of them to see Linda Gray (the symbolic queen of the underworld), and he is also the first of them to die, although many years in the future. Tom has a more conventional value system than Devin. Where Devin is captivated by the magical world of Joyland, where he sells happiness, for Tom Joyland is just a summer job—fun, but not a sacred calling.

Wendy represents Devin’s childhood. She is the youthful puppy love that initially breaks his heart and pushes him out into the world to undergo his coming-of-age experience.

Particularly in boys’ coming-of-age stories, a first sexual experience (especially with an older woman) represents the transformation from boy to man. The fact that Wendy and Devin never quite got around to making love signifies that Devin was still a boy.

The name Wendy is associated with Peter Pan, the boy who refused to grow up. Her rejection, fortunately, pushes Devin out of his perfect Neverland fantasy of childhood. In real-world terms, Wendy is seduced away from him by money, drugs, and parties. She is less like the lost boys of Neverland than like the children in Pinocchio’s Toyland, who play and drink and smoke until they turn into donkeys. Wendy’s actions suggest that she has made a donkey of herself.

Wendy’s wild child ways resemble Annie’s behavior at the same age. Annie eventually grew up, and Wendy may do so as well.