45 pages • 1 hour read
Paolo BacigalupiThe Water Knife
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2015A 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
Water
In the novel, water equates to money and power, and people are willing to kill for it because it has become such a precious resource, especially in the desert. Much of the novel’s action centers on characters’ access to water. We also see the physicality of water in the form of the Colorado River carving through the desert, and the rushing water taking out everything in its path when the Blue Mesa Dam is destroyed. People in the novel don’t understand how much they rely on water until it’s not coming out of their faucets anymore. Angel describes how people like the residents of Carver City hold out hope that they can make it without water after it’s been cut: “But it takes time for people to get a grip on how screwed they are. Relief agencies come in, so they hang on a little longer on buckets and Red Cross pumps and dipping Clearsacs into the river on their own” (353-354). Maria, on the other hand, notes how well suited the Vet’s hyenas are to the desert in contrast to humans: “This is their world, Maria realized. […] We are not like you, sister. We don’t need water. We need blood alone” (132).
Cadillac Desert
Cadillac Desert is a book written by Marc Reisner and published in 1986. The book is written about land development and water policy in the western United States and concludes that development-driven policies, formed when settling the West was the country’s main concern, are having long-term negative effects on the environment and water quantity. The book is subtitled The American West and its Disappearing Water.
Several characters in the novel reference Cadillac Desert as an anticipation of the environmental disaster they find themselves in. Lucy and Ratan both have first-edition copies of the book. However, to someone like Maria, the book is pretty much worthless, except for what she can get out of it by selling it: “I need a book about how I’m supposed to live now. Unless you got a book like that, I don’t need the weight” (181). Angel shares a similar sentiment about the book when he tells Lucy, “All of you with your nice hard-copy first editions, all of you pretending you know shit. […] Acting like you saw all this shit coming. […] Back then nobody gave a shit about what [Reisner] said” (343). Cadillac Desert, then, is only beneficial to these characters if the people who came before them had heeded Reisner’s words.
La Santa Muerte
La Santa Muerte is a female deity in Mexican and Mexican-American folk Catholicism. She is a personification of death and is associated with healing, protection, and safe delivery to the afterlife. She is also known as the Skinny Lady and generally appears as a skeletal female figure, clad in a long robe and holding one or more objects, usually a scythe and a globe.
Both Angel and Julio reference La Santa Muerte, or the Skinny Lady, several times throughout the course of the novel. Angel believes that the shadow looming over him after he’s been shot in Chapter 36 is the Skinny Lady “coming to gather him up” (302). Merry Perrys make prayers and offerings to the Skinny Lady. Julio has a tattoo on his arm of La Santa Muerte. Maria tells Damien that he should throw her the keys to her cage as an offering to the Skinny Lady before he goes off to join the firefight that Angel and Lucy had started. Mexican culture has maintained a certain reverence toward death. The Catholic Church in Mexico condemns the worship of La Santa Muerte as invalid, but it is firmly entrenched in Mexican culture. La Santa Muerte and events like the Day of the Dead are reminders of people’s mortality. In the novel, too, with so much death happening all around the characters—and so close to the Mexican border—it would make sense that many of them would make offerings to La Santa Muerte to keep them safe.
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By Paolo Bacigalupi
