49 pages • 1 hour read
Olive's Ocean
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Themes
Identity and Self-Discovery
Content Warning: This section of the guide contains references to the death of a young person and the nonconsensual recording of a kiss.
In Olive’s Ocean, 12-year-old Martha doesn’t yet have a concrete persona that she wants to project onto the world. This is in part due to her age, as Martha is experiencing a pivotal time in adolescence in which she and her peers change and emotionally develop. However, her introspective and contemplative characterization advances her lack of a self, as she is often internally preoccupied and non-participatory in action around her. Additionally, her preoccupation with Olive acts as a buffer as she discovers who she wants to be in association with what kind of person Olive might have been. As the narrative progresses, Martha begins to understand the person she wants to be, and she eventually divorces her identity from Olive’s so that she can begin to assume her own.
Martha’s lack of a sense of self is mostly positive, as it allows Martha to experiment with identities and confront her feelings and their changes. By attempting to embody Olive in real life and through her writing, Martha finds she is able to confront difficult challenges. Through the “Olive” character she creates, she can face Jimmy’s inimical influence by turning James (the Jimmy character in the Olive story) into a “stupid, flat-faced boy” (168). Her lack of defined boundaries makes her vulnerable to bad-intentioned people like Jimmy, but her ability to assume the personality of others gives her the perspective and strength to endure. Martha’s illegibility becomes a source of pride. No one can detect her thoughts or emotions, and their lack of knowledge makes her unknowable. She finds fulfillment in keeping her thoughts and emotions—who she is—to herself. The narrator says:
No one at all in the airport, or on the entire planet for that matter, knew her thoughts, knew what she was carrying inside her head and heart. And at that very minute, what was inside her head and heart made her feel as though there was no one else in the whole world she would rather be (225).
By the end of the story, Martha has in part defined who she wants to be. After her near-death experience while collecting seawater for Olive’s mother, she gains additional perspective about her place in the world. Martha realizes that she is not the center of everyone’s story, much like she’s not the center of her own in Olive’s Ocean. She decides to embrace this perspective and not allow characters like Jimmy to upset her or alter her personality. Therefore, the emotional strength she gains during this summer break becomes solidified as a personality trait she will take forth as she comes of age. Additionally, through her close relationship with her grandmother, Martha learns how to help others when she feels down. Once a coping skill of Godbee’s, Martha now absorbs this trait and carries it forward, going so far as to write Olive’s name in seawater to retroactively accomplish Olive’s aspirations. While her identity is still in the making, Martha spends the summer discovering who she wants to become as she enters her teenage years.
Coping With Loss and Death
Throughout her summer in Cape Cod, Martha processes the death of Olive and the impending loss of her grandmother, Godbee. At the formative age of 12, Martha begins the story unsure of how to move beyond Olive’s death or handle Godbee’s imminent passing. By working through her feelings about Olive and helping Olive achieve her goals retroactively, Martha learns to process Olive’s death in a healthy way. Additionally, she observes the different ways people react to Godbee’s impending death and decides how she will address the loss of her beloved grandmother.
Initially, Martha reads Olive’s journal entry and can’t help but visit the site of the accident, though she isn’t sure what is compelling her to do so. Martha learns that Olive wanted to befriend her, and Martha feels guilt over her best friend’s dismissal of Olive as “weird.” Now unable to make things better for Olive in life, she uses Olive’s journal entry to retroactively connect with Olive and help her achieve her goals, such as her goal of being “friends” with Martha and experiencing the ocean. Martha also keeps Olive alive by constantly thinking about her and writing a story whose main character is called Olive. Further, Martha uses Olive—or her idea of Olive—as a way to confront her experiences. When Jimmy harms Martha by videotaping their kiss and telling her it was just a bet. Martha wonders “what Olive would have done in this situation” (154).
After Godbee indicates she might not be around much longer, Dennis yells at her and tells Martha, “Your grandmother’s just fine” (49). Dennis doesn’t want to face the prospect that his mother might die. Godbee deals with loss matter-of-factly, telling Martha, “I can’t smell the ocean or run along the beach anymore either, but I remember what those things were like, too. Strange, I remember certain feelings and sensations more clearly the further away from them I become” (98). As with Martha and Olive, Godbee uses her mind to turn the losses into presences. Through her memories, Godbee can make the “feelings and sensations” reappear, suggesting that loss and death occur in the tangible world, but in the intangible world of thoughts and emotions, almost anything can come back.
Toward the end of the novel, Martha experiences a near-death experience while trying to collect seawater for Olive’s mother. She gains the perspective that she is not the center of everyone’s world but a background character in everyone else’s story. This allows her to understand what she must do to grieve her losses and live for herself instead of depending on others for her identity. Additionally, understanding her own insignificance in the grand scheme helps her to understand her grandmother’s imminent passing and encourages her to get to know Godbee while they still have time together.
Experiencing Change in Adolescence
Martha’s home in Wisconsin represents a source of constancy. In Olive’s Ocean, not only does the outside world begin to present challenges, but her place of stability and safety is no longer accessible. About her Wisconsin home, the narrator says, “Everything was safe here, stamped on her heart: the noises, the smells, the look and feel of each room” (242). Stuck on Cape Cod, Martha seeks comfort in Godbee and her brother, but she lacks the stability she is familiar with. Martha, experiencing a formative summer of maturity and change, quickly encounters unfamiliar and destabilizing challenges all around her, from Olive’s death to her development and loss of feelings for Jimmy, to Godbee’s impending passing. Throughout the novel, Martha learns how to cope with these changes when they come instead of expecting the consistency that often comes with childhood routine.
Olive, a peer of Martha’s, tragically dying before Martha’s departure to Cape Cod marks the first major challenge Martha confronts in the novel. Throughout the summer, she keeps Olive on her mind, attempting to mourn and celebrate her peer whose life has suddenly been cut far too short. As Martha comes to terms with this reality, she must begin to think about the scale of the world around her and the fleeting nature of human life. Martha also experiences developing a crush on Jimmy, who then betrays her trust and violates her agency by videotaping her against her will. Reclaiming her agency and recovering from this hurt is another challenge Martha must endure largely on her own. Further, Godbee’s imminent passing forces Martha to confront death not only after the fact but also before. She must decide what kind of relationship she wants with Godbee all while understanding she has limited time with her grandmother. Leaving behind the lens with which she viewed the world in childhood, Martha emerges from the summer with perspective and a greater understanding of the world.
The theme also allows a comprehensive discussion of Martha’s tumultuous and heightened emotions, a staple of adolescence and puberty. The narrator writes, “Martha’s feelings for her mother bounced between love and hate quickly and without warning as if her feelings were illogical, willful, and completely out of Martha’s control” (33). Martha’s volatile feelings for Alice reflect her generally acute emotional state. Whether the subject is her mother, Olive, Jimmy, or Godbee, Martha inevitably develops intense feelings about them. After she discovers the kiss is a trick, Martha feels like there are a “million puzzle pieces floating around inside her” (153). The image reflects her fluid and unfixed interior life. Martha learns to organize her feelings so that they don’t overpower her or make her feel excessively sorrowful. When Martha pats her cheeks in the mirror, she feels like she’s “putting in order all the thoughts inside her head” (197).
When Martha finally returns home at the end of the story, the narrator states, “Home was the same as when Martha had left it, but because she had changed, her world seemed slightly different, as though she were seeing everything in sharper focus” (226). Technically, her home isn’t the same. As the experiences in Cape Cod alter Martha’s interior world, her view of her exterior world carries a different interpretation, which amends how she perceives it. Martha has matured and gained numerous life experiences over the summer in Cape Cod, and while she now can return to the safety of her home, she is better prepared for more challenges to come as she continues her coming-of-age arc.
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