70 pages • 2 hours read
Catriona WardThe Last House on Needless Street
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Russian Nesting Doll
One of Mrs. Bannerman’s prized possessions is a Russian nesting doll, a small hollow figurine that houses progressively smaller versions of itself within, until the smallest figurine, which holds nothing. The nesting doll rests atop the mantlepiece in Ted’s house, along with the silver picture frame and the broken music box with the ballerina figurine. Olivia has a particular dislike for the figurine: For her, it represents being trapped by the influence of others. In a sense, she is correct. On one level, the doll represents Mrs. Bannerman’s cruel and suffocating influence on Ted’s (and his other identities’) life. The doll is also an early indicator that something is “wrong” with Ted’s perception of reality. In one scene, he smashes it into tiny pieces, yet it appears whole and repaired later on: “Mommy kept the music box but she put the dolls in the trash and they are gone forever; another part of her I can never get back, another thing I broke that cannot be mended” (174). In the real house on Needless Street, the doll has long since been destroyed. However, in Ted’s mental version of the house, which he constructed to protect himself from his mother’s abuse, it exists to be broken over and over again. Ward explains in the Afterword that for people with DID, “Memory is not linear, but nestled in a series of compartments […]. Retaining too much information is dangerous because it means they might have to remember other things too” (332). This configuration of memory means that the layers of self are contiguous, but not intersecting. However, what happens to one reverberates through the others. Even Dee experiences this, to some extent: she does not have DID, but she does contain the alternate reality/altered memories she constructed to hide from her guilt. At one point, Ward writes, “Her memories cannot be kept at bay. They are nested inside one another. Like one of those Russian dolls, she thinks” (221). The image of the nesting doll, in Dee’s case, is symbolic of the truth that she has buried deep down, but which still resonates through her consciousness.
Red Birds
Dee’s dreams are haunted by crimson birds, constructing their nests from strands of Lulu’s hair. The image ties together Dee’s guilt for killing the birds in Ted’s yard to hurt Ted and her guilt for leaving Lulu to die. The red birds in her dreams symbolize her reaction to seeing Lulu’s unconscious body bleeding from her dented head by the lakeshore: “Threads of blood trickle out of her hair. They look kind of like red birds in flight; the way children draw birds, lines against a white sky” (275). In this way, the entire scene from her dream foreshadows the revelation in Dee’s role in Lulu’s death. The story she has constructed will not allow Dee to fully visualize the scene, but the imagery of the dream torments her nonetheless. As Dee dies of rattlesnake venom, this imagery comes back to torment her. She chases the specter of Lulu through the woods, only to witness “Red birds explode from her head in a cloud” (282). At the very end, Dee cannot recall her sister’s face, only the red birds, symbolic of Dee’s hand in her death.
The Pretty Pebble
In the memory Dee constructs of the day Lulu disappeared, “[t]he last thing Lulu said to Dee was, I found a pretty pebble” (49). Dee obsesses over this in the following years: “What did it look like? […] Dee will never know, because she got up and walked away without a glance” (49). “Pretty pebble” becomes almost a mantra for Dee; she repeats the phrase to remind herself of her loss and the debt she owes to Lulu for walking away from her. At first glance, Lulu’s pretty pebble seems to represent the need to treat loved ones better: We can never truly know what our last words or actions toward another person will be. For Dee, her last gesture toward Lulu was one of spiteful cruelty. However, Dee’s true memories of that fateful day are revealed in Chapter 43: Dee’s negligence and annoyance with Lulu caused her to leave Lulu unattended while she attempted to engage in sexual activities with a young man. Lulu fell from the rocks attempting to retrieve a pretty pebble from the water; she hit her head and was abducted by Mrs. Bannerman when Lulu panicked and ran away from her unconscious body. The pretty pebble symbolizes guilt for Dee and innocence for Lulu and Ted. Just as Dee is unable to hold onto her actual memories of the day by the lake due to the torturous guilt, she is also unwilling to hold onto the pretty pebble: She drops it by the trail, watching Mrs. Bannerman’s car drive away. Lulu was an innocent victim of her sister’s negligence and Mrs. Bannerman’s cruelty. Ted is nearly another casualty of their guilt but is saved, largely through chance. Dee’s pretty pebble is the catalyst of his salvation: He finds it in the sand when Rob takes him back to the lake to pay his respects to Lulu. Ted falls, reopening his knife wound—this allows Little Teddy, another innocent child, to finally tell Ted where Mrs. Bannerman hid Lulu’s body. Though he was no longer under suspicion for Lulu’s disappearance, finding her body completely exonerates Ted, and, more importantly, finally convinces himself of his own innocence.
