NOS4A2

Vic writes a popular series of children’s puzzle books called Search Engine. The hero is a robot who navigates labyrinths that seem impossible at first. A positive review in The New York Times compares it to a mixture of M. C. Escher’s visual illusions and the Where’s Waldo? books. Search Engine represents a positive aspect of creative imagination in a story that often punishes those who use the alternate realities provided by fantasy: the inscapes. Even though Vic creates Search Engine as an act of desperate self-defense, that does not change the fact that millions of people—children, especially—benefit from her creative act. Even if her art arises from sorrow, doubt, and fear, Vic brings more joy into the world, a selfless act by a person who is aware of her tendency to focus solely on her own problems.

Search Engine symbolizes Vic’s creativity and her knack for solving puzzles that seem impenetrable at first. Hutter mentions that a professor at Quantico uses Vic’s books to teach agents in training advanced observational skills. Theoretically, Vic’s art could also lead to greater skills for those whose job is to protect others.

Search Engine also represents the different approaches adults and children take to solving problems: “Adults had a harder time with it than children did, and Vic had gradually realized that this was because grown-ups were always trying to see their way through to the end, and they couldn’t do it because there was too much information” (758). Children, on the other hand, are open to possibilities arriving to them rather than needing their possibilities to be laid out in a single line. This grants children the creativity to be able to solve the puzzles.

The Shorter Way Bridge is both a metaphor and, for Vic, a literal shortcut between distances. A bridge provides passage between two points that would not otherwise connect. Vic, Maggie, and Manx all have versions of a shortcut. Maggie uses the tiles to take shortcuts to answers that she would not, or could not, figure out on her own. She creates a bridge between questions and answers. Manx uses the Wraith—which also requires a passenger—to bridge the gaps between the real world and Christmasland, and mortality and eternal life.

An inscape is the opposite of an escape, in some senses. The use of the inscapes also requires a cost of those who travel by them: Maggie’s stammer and self-harm, Manx’s state of being “bled dry,” and the fever and headaches that Vic experiences. Vic provides a detailed description of the inscapes: “It’s a bridge, but it’s also the inside of my own head” (441). These kinds of remarks lead more than one mental health worker to lead to her current perspective: “It was what her psychiatrist had always insisted it was: an escape hatch she leapt through when she couldn’t handle reality, the comforting empowerment fantasy of a violently depressed woman with a history of trauma” (673).

Ultimately, the inscapes symbolize the power of the creative mind, the toll that creation can take on someone who uses the world of fantasy to impose order on chaos, and a reminder that each person has a unique, subjective experience of reality.