Sel Character Analysis

The protagonist and narrator of “Somewhere Along the Line the Pearl Would Be Handed to Me,” Sel is a blue mussel who grows up in Hudson Bay. Sel has few defining characteristics, aside from his desire to have new adventures and his intense love of his friend Muss. When Muss arrives in Hudson Bay with stories of the continental U.S. and specifically San Francisco, Sel feels he has no choice but to follow his friend back across the country. Sel is immediately taken with Muss’s insistence that life has no meaning; people (or mussels) should just enjoy it to the greatest extent they can. His one desire is to hear the native pearly mussels of the central U.S. tell their stories, so he’s distraught when he discovers that all the pearly mussels are dead. Though Sel isn’t as interested in sex as Muss, he nevertheless has several sexual encounters with female mussels over the course of his journey. However, once the mussels engage in a mass spawning in Pearl Harbor, he realizes the consequences of spawning—the mussels are enraged and distraught when they realize they’ve fathered a generation of young mussels who believe that life should have meaning. Sel dies during the bombing of Pearl Harbor when his shell breaks, making it impossible for him to close his shell and protect himself from the hot water.