The Candymakers

The black, yellow, and red butterfly is an important symbol that represents the idea of personal transformation and growth. Each of the four contestants has a personal connection to the butterfly, and that connection changes throughout the course of the contest. As a coming-of-age novel, the butterfly represents the transformation that each contestant undergoes as they move from a child to a teenager, but it also symbolizes the changes that result from the connections they’ve made with each other.

In the beginning, Logan deeply desires to witness a caterpillar morph into a butterfly. He watches the butterfly chrysalis every day, but he still misses the moment the “black, yellow, and red” (113) butterfly emerges. This symbolizes Logan’s feelings about himself. He is badly scarred from the burns he suffered as a child, but he doesn’t distinguish his physical change as an inner change. It’s only at the end of the novel, when Daisy gives him the childhood photo of himself, that he recognizes the internal shift that has happened inside him. In Daisy’s assignment-file picture of five-year-old Logan, he has a “Yellow, black, and red” butterfly on the tip of his nose (452). The photo is accompanied by a note that says, “If nothing ever changed, there’d be no such things as butterflies.” Before this moment, Logan had always failed to see the butterfly change, just as he’d failed to see the changes in himself. After he sees the butterfly in Daisy’s photo, he embraces the changes in himself. He recognizes that he has become a more resilient person as a result of his childhood accident, but it’s the friendships with the other contestants that has changed him the most. 

Miles sees a “yellow, black, and red butterfly” (127) fly near him while he’s at home. He sees another butterfly with the same color pattern while he’s in the bee room. He believes that seeing such a rare butterfly twice in the same day must be a sign from the drowned girl. Daisy sees the same butterfly flutter past her while sitting by the pond. She acknowledges that it's a special occasion to see a butterfly so rare. For both Miles and Daisy, the butterfly is symbolic of how they are ultimately transformed by the friendships they make during the competition.

Philip views the butterfly inside its cocoon as symbolic of how he feels trapped. Just as the butterfly is on the verge of transforming into something new, he feels trapped by his secret desires that he can’t yet reveal. Later, when he sees the fully emerged butterfly move past him, he “figured it was simply happy at no longer being held prisoner” (328) in its chrysalis. By the end of the contest, Philip feels a similar freedom when he finally reveals and embraces his secret.