The white pavilion represents the pristine, idealized conception of the world that the narrator is forced to leave behind as she realizes that life is often messy and unappealing. Throughout “A Memory,” the narrator must come to terms with the occasional ugliness of reality, which becomes apparent when she sees the boy she loves get a nosebleed in class and, later, when she witnesses the bathers’ bothersome antics on the beach. Overall, she has some difficulty tolerating anything that is unexpected or that does not conform to her idealized ideas about the world. As a result, she experiences a series of jarring realizations. The most upsetting of these takes place after the bathers have left their mark on the beach, which is when she unexpectedly bursts into tears after catching sight of “a small worn white pavilion.” The pavilion actually appears three times in the course of the story, transformed from “a little pavilion” to “the clean white roof of the white pavilion” and then to the “small worn white pavilion” that stirs up pity in the narrator and provokes the strong emotional reaction at the story’s end. This evolution, which is actually a degradation, symbolizes the permanent shift that has taken place in the narrator’s consciousness: the pavilion goes from seeming quaint and pristine to seeming “worn” and tired, thus mirroring the narrator’s own worldview, as she now recognizes that life isn’t as romantic and perfect as she’d like to think.
The White Pavilion Quotes in A Memory
From my position, I was looking at a rectangle brightly lit, actually glaring at me, with sun, sand, water, a little pavilion, a few solitary people in fixed attitudes, and around it all a border of dark rounded oak trees, like the engraved thunderclouds surrounding illustrations in the Bible. Ever since I had begun taking painting lessons, I had made small frames with my fingers, to look out at everything.
But like a needle going in and out among my thoughts were the children running on the sand, the upthrust oak trees growing over the clean pointed roof of the white pavilion, and the slowly changing attitudes of the grown-up people who had avoided the city and were lying prone and laughing on the water’s edge.
Still I lay there, feeling victimized by the sight of the unfinished bullwark where they had piled and shaped the wet sand around their bodies, which changed the appearance of the beach like the ravages of a storm. I looked away, and for the object which met my eye, the small worn white pavilion, I felt pity suddenly overtake me, and I burst into tears.
The White Pavilion Symbol Timeline in A Memory
