The Echo Maker

49 pages • 1 hour read

The Echo Maker

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2006

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Parts 4-5

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Part 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1: “I Am No One”

Part 1, Pages 1-23 Summary

Content Warning: This novel deals with issues related to addiction, mental health conditions, and brain injury.

The story opens with a description of the sandhill cranes gathering on the flats around Nebraska’s Platte River. They look prehistoric, like pterodactyls, each with a bald red spot on its head.

Karen received word that her younger brother, Mark, who is in his late twenties, was in a car accident. She is driving to Kearney, the town where she and Mark grew up. At the hospital, Karin learns that Mark has a moderately severe head injury. A bare patch has been shaved on his head and wires attached. Hours later, Mark develops a cerebral edema. After a drain is installed to relieve the pressure in his skull, Karin is allowed again to enter Mark’s room. On the bed stand, she finds a note with puzzling message: “I am No One/But Tonight on North Line Road/GOD led me to you/So You could Live/And bring back someone else” (19). No one outside the hospital staff has been allowed to visit Mark, and no one there admits any knowledge of the note.

Karin takes care of Mark in the hospital as if he were a small child, much as she did when they were both children. She thinks back to childhood when she protected Mark and tried to help him fit into the world by getting him to find an identity, a “brand” as she called it. Mark finally found an identity among the “losers” who didn’t fit in anywhere.

Mark’s neurologist explains to Karin that the reptilian layer of Mark’s brain—the most primitive region—is functioning. Everything built over the reptilian brain evolved on the top of what was already there, and Mark is gradually stitching those more sophisticated functions back together.

Karin takes careful notes throughout Mark’s recovery. Her notes are both a way for her to remember everything the doctor says and a story that she thinks Mark will need to make sense of his recovery when he regains consciousness.

As Mark regains consciousness, he experiences incoherent sense-memories of the moment of the accident while his mammalian brain and frontal cortex try to make sense of it. Among his disjointed thoughts is an urgency to tell Karin that his accident isn’t what it seems: He wasn’t trying to kill himself.

Part 1, Pages 24-48 Summary

Mark continues to reassemble his thoughts. Random words pass through his head. He has a vague feeling that there is someone he was supposed to save. At this point, he can walk clumsily and echo words spoken to him, a phenomenon called “echolalia,” but not produce new speech.

Mark’s friends come to visit him. Karin has always thought of this group of friends as losers, but she leaves them alone with Mark. When she returns, she finds Mark sitting up and trying to play catch with a wadded up piece of paper. Karin feels both jealous and grateful that his friends have been able to do something for Mark that she has not.

Karin learns from the police that there was evidence of three vehicles at the scene of the accident. Mark was traveling more than 80 miles/hour with one vehicle behind him when an oncoming light truck swerved into his lane. They think Mark might have been playing “chicken” with someone.

When she isn’t with Mark, Karin contemplates calling Robert Karsh, an old lover, but he is married. Instead, she calls Daniel Riegel, an old friend of Mark’s with whom Mark had a falling out. She had dated Daniel for a while, but she cheated on him with Robert Karsh, and they split up. Daniel works for the County Crane Refuge. They agree to meet.

Part 1, Pages 49-73 Summary

Daniel comes to the hospital while Karin is there with Mark, and Mark recoils from Daniel, scrambling to get away. Over the next few weeks, Karin comes to depend on Daniel for support; she has actually begun to doubt herself. She feels grateful for Daniel’s reassurance but also feels guilty for the way she treated him in the past. She once saw him as self-righteous and but now sees him as idealistic. He is easy to be with, and they soon become lovers again.

Mark begins to express his own thoughts, starting with, “There are magnetism waves in my skull” (59). He doesn’t recognize Karin and is convinced she is an impostor. She tries to persuade him with logic and evidence, but he becomes agitated.

Mark’s doctor explains that Mark appears to have Capgras syndrome, a delusional condition in which a person can recognize the faces of a loved-one but can’t tie the face to the emotions connected with the person. Because of this, the person seems like a stranger with a familiar face. Mark can’t understand why the “real” Karin isn’t already there. He tells Karin stories about his sister, and in the stories, Karin sees herself through Mark’s eyes as someone heroic who has always saved him when he was in trouble.

Karin shows him the note she found on his bedside table, but he doesn’t understand it any more than she does. Mark isn’t sure what is real around him. He is afraid the hospital is a movie set, and all the people in it are actors who all seem to be lying to him. The doctors claim their tests prove he can’t do things when it is obvious to him that he can. His friends seem different too. He believes they lie to him, telling him he is forgetting things or seeing things wrong when he knows he isn’t.

Mark is moved to a rehab facility. At the rehab center, Mark and Karin meet Barbara Gillespie, a nurse’s aide. She is friendly and supportive to both of them. Karin wants to be just like her—composed, centered, at home with herself.

Part 1, Pages 74-95 Summary

Karin continues spending time with Daniel, who begins to accept her. Karin knows she doesn’t deserve his care. She mistreated him in the past, and she sees herself as worthless. Daniel meditates daily in order to overcome the sense of dying minute-to-minute with the ongoing growth of his personality. His goal is to flow like water. Karin is horrified by this, finding the idea of flowing like water terrifying.

Mark is experiencing increased paranoia since everyone around him seems to be lying to him. He makes up ever more elaborate explanations to explain how the “fake” Karin knows so much about his real sister. It becomes evident from her stories that their father was prone to belief in government and corporate conspiracies. In addition, their mother held extreme religious beliefs.

Karin and Daniel go to the site of Mark’s accident. Karin points out how unusual it is for three vehicles to converge at one point in the middle of the night on a barely used road; it can’t have been a coincidence. She concludes that Mark must have been playing some kind of game with his friends.

Daniel brings Karin a collection of books on neurology written by Gerald Weber. Weber’s books help Karin to begin to understand what is happening to Mark. She writes to Dr. Weber, hoping he will come see Mark.

Part 1 Analysis

Part 1 employs three narrative voices. It opens with a description of the cranes given by an omniscient narrator who is privy to the grand sweep of time from prehistory to the present, a perspective that wouldn’t be available to any of the characters within the story. This same narrator appears wherever the cranes are described. When Karin enters the story, the point of view switches to third-person limited that describes what Karin thinks and feels but doesn’t comment on her inner state.

Mark’s point of view enters the story in a third-person stream-of-consciousness style that conveys Mark’s disorientation and disconnected memories. As Mark begins to recover, his thoughts become more coherent. At that point, the point of view becomes more structured.

Mark is an unreliable narrator. In Mark’s sections, the reader is confined to what Mark knows and understands, and Mark is unaware of his mistakes. He rejects evidence from other people telling him he has made a mistake when he can’t perform tasks that should be simple. The reader has to infer that Mark has gaps he can’t recognize.

Stories and Meaning is an important theme introduced in Part 1. Weber observes that story is a tool of the frontal cortex to create a sense of self. In his first scenes, Mark experiences flashes of memories, but he has no access to his cortex to tell the story and make sense of the memories. Later, Mark confabulates—making up stories to explain where the false Karin comes from and why everyone seems to be lying to him.

The motif of echoes is introduced by Mark’s neurologist, who describes Mark’s early utterances as echolalia. Mark becomes an echo maker in that other people’s attempts to interact with him bounce off him and reflect back to them without meaning. Mark becomes Narcissus, the counterpart to Echo in the Greek myth of Echo and Narcissus. He can’t respond meaningfully to Karin, so he becomes increasingly wrapped up in himself.

Part 1 is also about The Negotiation of Identity. Mark’s accident disrupts the part of his identity that was informed by Karin while Karin experiences a different shattering of identity. She has spent her life taking care of her younger brother, so when Mark refuses to participate in their former relationship, Karin begins to feel like the impostor he thinks she is.

Although Mark’s injury and recovery are the focus of Part 1, the story also contains elements of a mystery, which appears when Karin finds the note in Mark’s room. The note suggests there is more to Mark’s accident than meets the eye. Mark reinforces the mystery when he thinks that he needs to tell Karin that the accident wasn’t an attempt to die by suicide.

A second clue in the mystery of Mark’s accident appears when Daniel and Karin go to the scene. Karin notes the sheer unlikeliness of the crash and concludes that Mark was playing reckless games with his friends. Although the story doesn’t evolve as a classical mystery, the question of what happened to Mark is a throughline that keeps the reader guessing. It also becomes a driving motive for Mark in Part 4.

Karin is the other point of view character in Part 1, and she is also negotiating her identity. She was a semi-maternal figure to Mark and tried to help him fit into the social world. As a child, Mark reinforced her role as a caregiver. After his injury, he idealizes the “real” Karin and confirms that the protective, self-effacing nurturer is the lovable person.

Daniel’s role in Karin’s life is to silently support her. He is a comfortable partner for her in that he doesn’t challenge her sense of identity, allowing her to be completely herself. However, he also doesn’t push back by giving her feedback that would force her to change. Karin needs to negotiate an identity that isn’t based on self-denial. Instead of learning from Daniel to allow herself to change, she clings to a rigid identity and tries to get Mark to reflect that identity back to her.