Little Bee

Just as Little Bee’s narrative opens with a recognition of her own identity conflict, Sarah begins by speaking of identity and the way that it allows a person to run from themselves. Charlie and Sarah’s need to hide from reality just like Little Bee, even though they are not actual refugees themselves or in any physical danger, suggests that the practice of constructing an identity is common to human beings, regardless of race, culture, or social class. Everyone, the novel suggests, is running from something.

Interestingly, Sarah lists Charlie and his Batman costume first, even though he is the least significant character of the three of them. This establishes the Batman costume as an important symbol for identity, a lens through which to understand Little Bee and Sarah’s more complex identity crises. Faced with his father’s tragic death, Charlie wears his Batman costume to give himself a sense of power and the ability to understand the world. As Batman, Charlie can fight evil and cleanly divide the world into “goodies” and “baddies” (good people and bad people) which is far easier for a four-year-old to grasp than the complex dilemma that led Andrew to kill himself. The Batman costume and the constructed identity allow Charlie to believe he is powerful even when his powerless, protecting his mental psyche and shielding himself from the dark realities of the world he is not yet ready or willing to comprehend.

Two years after Sarah cuts off her middle finger to save Little Bee’s life, she describes the injury as only a mild inconvenience that occasionally interferes with her work as a magazine editor. Sarah’s mild annoyance with her missing middle finger suggests that the sacrifice she made to save Little Bee was ultimately not a great cost for her, even though Andrew could not bring himself to make it. At the same time, the subtext of Sarah’s statement suggests that her first experience of the real horror present in the world left her traumatized and numb. Although Sarah does not have nightmares like Little Bee, her mere recognition that the world is a horrific place and she is doing nothing to help it drain the energy from her life. Her loss of “pleased” suggests she no longer feels happiness, while the loss of “ecstasies” suggests she no longer feels joy. Rather, her life has become a pattern of compromise and getting by. Although she does not suffer evil in the same tangible, threatening ways that Little Bee does, her missing finger symbolizes her loss of innocence and the numbness that overtakes her life when she cannot quite reconcile the fact that she lives in comfort while others suffer.

At Andrew’s funeral, when Charlie realizes that the coffin laying in the open grave holds Andrew’s body, he jumps into the hole, screaming, and tries to pry the lid off of the coffin to retrieve his father. Charlie’s tragedy operates on two different levels in this scene. On the most obvious level, Charlie grieves his father’s sudden, unexplainable death. On the deeper level, when Charlie begins to realize that he cannot open the coffin lid, his constructed identity as Batman fails him. Throughout the novel, Charlie takes on his Batman identity to feel powerful and capable in spite of his own powerlessness, to protect himself from the fact that he cannot understand or prevent Andrew’s death. When even “Batman” cannot rescue Andrew from the grave, Charlie must recognize that the power he feels as Batman is only a façade, suggesting that the safety or power that any person feels from their assumed identity is flimsy and fleeting. Thus, at the same time, Charlie faces both the reality of death and the reality of his own powerlessness in a frightening world, which explains Sarah’s particular grief in this moment and arguably makes it the most tragic scene in the story.

On the day of Andrew’s funeral, Sarah struggles to understand while she feels no emotion over her husband’s death—no pain, no grief. The day on the beach that Sarah references is the day that she cuts her own finger off to save Little Bee after Andrew fails to. Sarah’s missing finger symbolizes the loss of innocence that occurs on that day, when Sarah is forced to recognize that the world is a horrific place and that her virtue-touting husband is powerless to confront it. The existence of such evil in the world challenges Sarah’s beliefs about her career and her environment, causing her to wonder what the actual value of a glossy fashion magazine is or how she can live in such a safe and comfortable life while young girls like Little Bee face mortal danger. However, rather than lean into these questions and faces the pain that she briefly glimpsed, Sarah runs from them for two years, hiding herself in her identity as a career woman and working mother until she is numb, so she no longer has to grapple with the pain and trauma of what she saw. In this way, Sarah’s missing finger not only symbolizes her loss of innocence, but also of her loss of passion and emotion.

With Little Bee sitting in her living room, Sarah realizes that the traumatic memories she’s been running from have come to meet her, and she must face them. The day that Sarah meets Little Bee on the Nigerian beach marks Sarah’s loss of innocence, since it is the first time she is forced to recognize that many human beings suffer unimaginable horrors while she lives in safety and comfort. However, rather than using this traumatic experience to find new purpose in her life, Sarah instead chooses to block it out. Her “defenses against nature” suggests that she shields herself behind her carefully maintained identity as a working mother and fashion editor, apparently hoping that the traumatic memories and awareness of other people’s suffering will someday disappear. Although Sarah has not yet realized that this identity keeps her from being a loving mother or friend, Sarah demonstrates that such a carefully managed sense of identity is a defense against having to confront the real world and all of its darkness.

When Andrew and Sarah first meet Little Bee and Nkiruka on the beach in Nigeria, pursued by the hunters, Andrew tries to absolve himself of responsibility for Little Bee and Nkiruka’s lives by claiming that they are “not his affair.” Although the leader is a vile sadist, both a rapist and a murderer, he makes a very reasonable point to Andrew. Andrew lives in England, a society that has a long history of exploiting countries like Nigeria and black people in particular, robbing them of their independence and natural resources at various times. For much of British history, Andrew’s country and his people viewed this as their right. Now, however, when Andrew has the opportunity to save two African girls’ lives, he suddenly wants to deny any responsibility or involvement. This is hypocritical not only because Andrew writes a moralistic column for The Times, but also because Andrew has the opportunity to hide himself in a wealthy country in large part because that country made its wealth by taking from places like Nigeria. The leader of the hunters aptly points out that for centuries, the developed world has exploited and consumed the developing world. The hunter suggests that every endangered child in Nigeria should be Andrew’s affair, as a beneficiary of so much stolen wealth.

Here, Sarah recounts the way that she and Andrew’s relationship began. Her statement that their newspaper was 31 pages of celebrity gossip and one page of news, which encapsulates London’s general ethos, suggests that all of society makes the same sort of moral compromise as Andrew and Sarah do. As a whole, society spends all of their energy on entertainment and flashy, meaningless news while ignoring the glaring fact that the rest of the world is riddled with suffering. In particular, Sarah names their single page of world news—which is not enough space to adequately explain any event anyway—a “memento mori,” which is a token reminder that everyone will someday die used in some religious traditions. The idea that the rest of the world’s suffering is a mere memento mori to Londoners is tremendously cynical, since it suggests that the only thing the developing world is good for is to look out at and appreciate that at least one isn’t in their position; things could always be worse.

In this passage, Sarah recalls how her affair with Lawrence began when she went to the Home Office to conduct interviews, determined to find something optimistic to write about since Andrew’s column had become terribly pessimistic. By Sarah’s account, Andrew only bemoans the state of society but never proposes solutions or tries to fix it himself. He passively observes and complains about the state of the world, but his actions end there. Andrew repeats this behavior on the beach in the greatest moral failure of his life: faced with a dire situation and the chance to do something about it, Andrew only complains and refuses to act. Andrew’s cynical column, which presumably paves the way for his moral failure, thus offers a strong warning against cynicism. If one will only talk about how bad the world is but will not make any constructive effort to change it, perhaps it would be just as well that they did not speak at all.

When Lawrence tries to convince Sarah to abandon Little Bee or turn her into the police so she will be somebody else’s problem, Sarah decides she is done with running from the traumatic memories and burden of guilt for leaving Little Bee behind on the beach in Nigeria. For Sarah, this turn from running from what happened with Little Bee to facing it marks a major development in her character. Sarah is taking the first steps towards letting her protective identity fall away (which her affair with Lawrence is a part of) and leaning into real action involving real people. Sarah’s statement that Andrew ran from the problem and let it “fester” until it killed him suggests that running away from such heavy issues and even from one’s own integrity will ultimately destroy a person; they may keep such thoughts below the surface for a time, but that can only lead to so much numbness before they cease to exist altogether, like Andrew did. Sarah’s decision to face Little Bee and the world that she represents so she can understand how to help her marks a critical step in Sarah’s development as a person, even though she will still hesitate and compromise at various points in the future.

On a trip to the grocery store, Sarah stops at a gas station to fuel up her car. Little Bee’s thought that the gasoline’s whine sounds like her family’s screams highlights the fact that the gasoline and other consumer goods that  citizens of the developed world enjoy often come through the exploitation or death of people in the developed world. The goods and products that can make one country appear wealthy and operate their vehicles, their homes, their computers, come at a very real human cost, such as all of the people slaughtered in Nigeria’s oil war. Little Bee’s observation that the fuel transfer goes directly into Sarah’s car (a sign of wealth) and is hidden from view reflects the fact that people like Sarah are often unaware of the human cost that’s paid for their lifestyles. Although Sarah certainly could find out about such atrocities, she does not make the effort to, and the gasoline and the blood that was spilt for her to just fill up her own tank are conveniently hidden from view. The novel suggests that this is one of the greatest atrocities of globalization.

Weeks after her husband’s funeral, Sarah returns to work at the magazine office for the first time. Sarah’s sudden realization that all of her work for the past decade as a fashion editor seems suddenly pointless is directly tied to her growing relationship with Little Bee. Little Bee’s life experiences, which are completely different from Sarah’s, offer Sarah a broader perspective with which to look at the world and the suffering in it. However, a consequence of this broader perspective is that compared to Little Bee’s life-and-death struggle or the plights of refugees all around the world, editing a fashion magazine that runs articles about sex and orgasms rather than people seems futile by comparison, a waste of space. Sarah’s note about wearing a bikini to a war recalls how foolish she was to think that she could simply vacation like a tourist in the middle of a brutal conflict, and suggests that in the same way that a green bikini is both inappropriate and ineffective clothing for a warzone, Sarah’s current career appears both ineffective and even inappropriate use of her time in the midst of a suffering world.

While Sarah is thinking of quitting her job to pursue something more meaningful, Lawrence tries to talk her out of it and even out of helping Little Bee at all. Lawrence’s argument that if Sarah can’t save every person, she shouldn’t save any obviously falls flat. However, this brief exchange between Lawrence and Sarah highlights one of the fundamental differences between them. Lawrence’s description of a “swarm” again suggests that he sees Little Bee and refugees like her as parasites, people who leech off of a healthier host country. In Lawrence’s mind, every additional refugee that arrives is another burden, weakening the country as a whole. He views them only as self-interested, negative actors. Sarah, by contrast, sees what Little Bee and people like her have to offer. This suggests that obviously there will be some cost in harboring refugees but that is paid back by the cultural richness and perspective they can offer their new country. In Sarah’s mind, refugees bring new life into a country, not death. While Lawrence cynically assumes that every person is as selfish and destructive as he is, Sarah (and, by extension, the novel as a whole) )believes in human goodness and the opportunity for refugees to contribute to society.

Here, Sarah mourns the way that growing up causes one to morally compromise and lose their idealism and sense of virtue, as age and comfort overtake one’s desire to make the world a better place. The process Sarah describes is arranged as a continuum between Charlie, Little Bee, and herself, revealing that the author intentionally arranges their trio of characters to describe three different age demographics and their response to horrors in the world. Although Sarah describes her own response as the most morally compromised, believing that perhaps the world’s “badness” is not so bad as it once seemed, Charlie’s response is not necessarily the best either. Although Charlie is full of idealism and the desire to fight bad guys, that idealism blinds him to the complex realities of the world, especially the fact that some people are both good and bad—there’s at least a little bad in everyone. Of the three, Little Bee engenders the healthiest response to horror in the world, in spite of her deep-seated trauma. Little Bee recognizes that such horrors exist but also recognizes that the seed of such evil and selfishness exists in herself as well. She never tries to vanquish all evil from the earth, so she knows her own limitations, but she makes efforts to help the people around her like Sarah and Charlie. Little Bee mixes a certain level of idealism with her own real-world experience, which seems to offer the most measured response to the horrors of the world.

Just as Little Bee’s narrative opens with a recognition of her own identity conflict, Sarah begins by speaking of identity and the way that it allows a person to run from themselves. Charlie and Sarah’s need to hide from reality just like Little Bee, even though they are not actual refugees themselves or in any physical danger, suggests that the practice of constructing an identity is common to human beings, regardless of race, culture, or social class. Everyone, the novel suggests, is running from something.

Interestingly, Sarah lists Charlie and his Batman costume first, even though he is the least significant character of the three of them. This establishes the Batman costume as an important symbol for identity, a lens through which to understand Little Bee and Sarah’s more complex identity crises. Faced with his father’s tragic death, Charlie wears his Batman costume to give himself a sense of power and the ability to understand the world. As Batman, Charlie can fight evil and cleanly divide the world into “goodies” and “baddies” (good people and bad people) which is far easier for a four-year-old to grasp than the complex dilemma that led Andrew to kill himself. The Batman costume and the constructed identity allow Charlie to believe he is powerful even when his powerless, protecting his mental psyche and shielding himself from the dark realities of the world he is not yet ready or willing to comprehend.

Two years after Sarah cuts off her middle finger to save Little Bee’s life, she describes the injury as only a mild inconvenience that occasionally interferes with her work as a magazine editor. Sarah’s mild annoyance with her missing middle finger suggests that the sacrifice she made to save Little Bee was ultimately not a great cost for her, even though Andrew could not bring himself to make it. At the same time, the subtext of Sarah’s statement suggests that her first experience of the real horror present in the world left her traumatized and numb. Although Sarah does not have nightmares like Little Bee, her mere recognition that the world is a horrific place and she is doing nothing to help it drain the energy from her life. Her loss of “pleased” suggests she no longer feels happiness, while the loss of “ecstasies” suggests she no longer feels joy. Rather, her life has become a pattern of compromise and getting by. Although she does not suffer evil in the same tangible, threatening ways that Little Bee does, her missing finger symbolizes her loss of innocence and the numbness that overtakes her life when she cannot quite reconcile the fact that she lives in comfort while others suffer.

At Andrew’s funeral, when Charlie realizes that the coffin laying in the open grave holds Andrew’s body, he jumps into the hole, screaming, and tries to pry the lid off of the coffin to retrieve his father. Charlie’s tragedy operates on two different levels in this scene. On the most obvious level, Charlie grieves his father’s sudden, unexplainable death. On the deeper level, when Charlie begins to realize that he cannot open the coffin lid, his constructed identity as Batman fails him. Throughout the novel, Charlie takes on his Batman identity to feel powerful and capable in spite of his own powerlessness, to protect himself from the fact that he cannot understand or prevent Andrew’s death. When even “Batman” cannot rescue Andrew from the grave, Charlie must recognize that the power he feels as Batman is only a façade, suggesting that the safety or power that any person feels from their assumed identity is flimsy and fleeting. Thus, at the same time, Charlie faces both the reality of death and the reality of his own powerlessness in a frightening world, which explains Sarah’s particular grief in this moment and arguably makes it the most tragic scene in the story.

On the day of Andrew’s funeral, Sarah struggles to understand while she feels no emotion over her husband’s death—no pain, no grief. The day on the beach that Sarah references is the day that she cuts her own finger off to save Little Bee after Andrew fails to. Sarah’s missing finger symbolizes the loss of innocence that occurs on that day, when Sarah is forced to recognize that the world is a horrific place and that her virtue-touting husband is powerless to confront it. The existence of such evil in the world challenges Sarah’s beliefs about her career and her environment, causing her to wonder what the actual value of a glossy fashion magazine is or how she can live in such a safe and comfortable life while young girls like Little Bee face mortal danger. However, rather than lean into these questions and faces the pain that she briefly glimpsed, Sarah runs from them for two years, hiding herself in her identity as a career woman and working mother until she is numb, so she no longer has to grapple with the pain and trauma of what she saw. In this way, Sarah’s missing finger not only symbolizes her loss of innocence, but also of her loss of passion and emotion.

With Little Bee sitting in her living room, Sarah realizes that the traumatic memories she’s been running from have come to meet her, and she must face them. The day that Sarah meets Little Bee on the Nigerian beach marks Sarah’s loss of innocence, since it is the first time she is forced to recognize that many human beings suffer unimaginable horrors while she lives in safety and comfort. However, rather than using this traumatic experience to find new purpose in her life, Sarah instead chooses to block it out. Her “defenses against nature” suggests that she shields herself behind her carefully maintained identity as a working mother and fashion editor, apparently hoping that the traumatic memories and awareness of other people’s suffering will someday disappear. Although Sarah has not yet realized that this identity keeps her from being a loving mother or friend, Sarah demonstrates that such a carefully managed sense of identity is a defense against having to confront the real world and all of its darkness.

When Andrew and Sarah first meet Little Bee and Nkiruka on the beach in Nigeria, pursued by the hunters, Andrew tries to absolve himself of responsibility for Little Bee and Nkiruka’s lives by claiming that they are “not his affair.” Although the leader is a vile sadist, both a rapist and a murderer, he makes a very reasonable point to Andrew. Andrew lives in England, a society that has a long history of exploiting countries like Nigeria and black people in particular, robbing them of their independence and natural resources at various times. For much of British history, Andrew’s country and his people viewed this as their right. Now, however, when Andrew has the opportunity to save two African girls’ lives, he suddenly wants to deny any responsibility or involvement. This is hypocritical not only because Andrew writes a moralistic column for The Times, but also because Andrew has the opportunity to hide himself in a wealthy country in large part because that country made its wealth by taking from places like Nigeria. The leader of the hunters aptly points out that for centuries, the developed world has exploited and consumed the developing world. The hunter suggests that every endangered child in Nigeria should be Andrew’s affair, as a beneficiary of so much stolen wealth.

Here, Sarah recounts the way that she and Andrew’s relationship began. Her statement that their newspaper was 31 pages of celebrity gossip and one page of news, which encapsulates London’s general ethos, suggests that all of society makes the same sort of moral compromise as Andrew and Sarah do. As a whole, society spends all of their energy on entertainment and flashy, meaningless news while ignoring the glaring fact that the rest of the world is riddled with suffering. In particular, Sarah names their single page of world news—which is not enough space to adequately explain any event anyway—a “memento mori,” which is a token reminder that everyone will someday die used in some religious traditions. The idea that the rest of the world’s suffering is a mere memento mori to Londoners is tremendously cynical, since it suggests that the only thing the developing world is good for is to look out at and appreciate that at least one isn’t in their position; things could always be worse.

In this passage, Sarah recalls how her affair with Lawrence began when she went to the Home Office to conduct interviews, determined to find something optimistic to write about since Andrew’s column had become terribly pessimistic. By Sarah’s account, Andrew only bemoans the state of society but never proposes solutions or tries to fix it himself. He passively observes and complains about the state of the world, but his actions end there. Andrew repeats this behavior on the beach in the greatest moral failure of his life: faced with a dire situation and the chance to do something about it, Andrew only complains and refuses to act. Andrew’s cynical column, which presumably paves the way for his moral failure, thus offers a strong warning against cynicism. If one will only talk about how bad the world is but will not make any constructive effort to change it, perhaps it would be just as well that they did not speak at all.

When Lawrence tries to convince Sarah to abandon Little Bee or turn her into the police so she will be somebody else’s problem, Sarah decides she is done with running from the traumatic memories and burden of guilt for leaving Little Bee behind on the beach in Nigeria. For Sarah, this turn from running from what happened with Little Bee to facing it marks a major development in her character. Sarah is taking the first steps towards letting her protective identity fall away (which her affair with Lawrence is a part of) and leaning into real action involving real people. Sarah’s statement that Andrew ran from the problem and let it “fester” until it killed him suggests that running away from such heavy issues and even from one’s own integrity will ultimately destroy a person; they may keep such thoughts below the surface for a time, but that can only lead to so much numbness before they cease to exist altogether, like Andrew did. Sarah’s decision to face Little Bee and the world that she represents so she can understand how to help her marks a critical step in Sarah’s development as a person, even though she will still hesitate and compromise at various points in the future.

On a trip to the grocery store, Sarah stops at a gas station to fuel up her car. Little Bee’s thought that the gasoline’s whine sounds like her family’s screams highlights the fact that the gasoline and other consumer goods that  citizens of the developed world enjoy often come through the exploitation or death of people in the developed world. The goods and products that can make one country appear wealthy and operate their vehicles, their homes, their computers, come at a very real human cost, such as all of the people slaughtered in Nigeria’s oil war. Little Bee’s observation that the fuel transfer goes directly into Sarah’s car (a sign of wealth) and is hidden from view reflects the fact that people like Sarah are often unaware of the human cost that’s paid for their lifestyles. Although Sarah certainly could find out about such atrocities, she does not make the effort to, and the gasoline and the blood that was spilt for her to just fill up her own tank are conveniently hidden from view. The novel suggests that this is one of the greatest atrocities of globalization.

Weeks after her husband’s funeral, Sarah returns to work at the magazine office for the first time. Sarah’s sudden realization that all of her work for the past decade as a fashion editor seems suddenly pointless is directly tied to her growing relationship with Little Bee. Little Bee’s life experiences, which are completely different from Sarah’s, offer Sarah a broader perspective with which to look at the world and the suffering in it. However, a consequence of this broader perspective is that compared to Little Bee’s life-and-death struggle or the plights of refugees all around the world, editing a fashion magazine that runs articles about sex and orgasms rather than people seems futile by comparison, a waste of space. Sarah’s note about wearing a bikini to a war recalls how foolish she was to think that she could simply vacation like a tourist in the middle of a brutal conflict, and suggests that in the same way that a green bikini is both inappropriate and ineffective clothing for a warzone, Sarah’s current career appears both ineffective and even inappropriate use of her time in the midst of a suffering world.

While Sarah is thinking of quitting her job to pursue something more meaningful, Lawrence tries to talk her out of it and even out of helping Little Bee at all. Lawrence’s argument that if Sarah can’t save every person, she shouldn’t save any obviously falls flat. However, this brief exchange between Lawrence and Sarah highlights one of the fundamental differences between them. Lawrence’s description of a “swarm” again suggests that he sees Little Bee and refugees like her as parasites, people who leech off of a healthier host country. In Lawrence’s mind, every additional refugee that arrives is another burden, weakening the country as a whole. He views them only as self-interested, negative actors. Sarah, by contrast, sees what Little Bee and people like her have to offer. This suggests that obviously there will be some cost in harboring refugees but that is paid back by the cultural richness and perspective they can offer their new country. In Sarah’s mind, refugees bring new life into a country, not death. While Lawrence cynically assumes that every person is as selfish and destructive as he is, Sarah (and, by extension, the novel as a whole) )believes in human goodness and the opportunity for refugees to contribute to society.

Here, Sarah mourns the way that growing up causes one to morally compromise and lose their idealism and sense of virtue, as age and comfort overtake one’s desire to make the world a better place. The process Sarah describes is arranged as a continuum between Charlie, Little Bee, and herself, revealing that the author intentionally arranges their trio of characters to describe three different age demographics and their response to horrors in the world. Although Sarah describes her own response as the most morally compromised, believing that perhaps the world’s “badness” is not so bad as it once seemed, Charlie’s response is not necessarily the best either. Although Charlie is full of idealism and the desire to fight bad guys, that idealism blinds him to the complex realities of the world, especially the fact that some people are both good and bad—there’s at least a little bad in everyone. Of the three, Little Bee engenders the healthiest response to horror in the world, in spite of her deep-seated trauma. Little Bee recognizes that such horrors exist but also recognizes that the seed of such evil and selfishness exists in herself as well. She never tries to vanquish all evil from the earth, so she knows her own limitations, but she makes efforts to help the people around her like Sarah and Charlie. Little Bee mixes a certain level of idealism with her own real-world experience, which seems to offer the most measured response to the horrors of the world.