Sunglasses Symbol Analysis

In Tell Me Three Things, sunglasses take on two layers of symbolic significance. On the surface, they symbolize wealth, which Jessie’s new school and neighborhood are riddled with. Everyone Jessie meets in Los Angeles, from her stepmother Rachel to the kids at Wood Valley, have designer sunglasses to wear whenever they’re outside. That the glasses are always designer emphasizes that sunglasses are a way for people to externally signal their wealth to one another. Fittingly, when Jessie finally buys a pair of her own, she buys knockoffs, which speaks to her middle-class background.

However, as the novel unfolds, sunglasses also come to symbolize one’s belonging and identity as a Californian. In the sunny Los Angeles weather, everyone wears sunglasses out of pure necessity—sunglasses, it seems, are part of the standard uniform for a Californian. It makes sense, then, that Jessie spends her first several weeks in Los Angeles squinting in the sun, unwilling to buy sunglasses of her own. At this point in the novel, Jessie doesn’t want to accept that her life is in California now, so wearing sunglasses just like everyone else would signal her willingness to try to make a life here. Furthermore, Jessie struggles to fit in at school during her first several weeks, and not having sunglasses seems to symbolize her lack of belonging in Wood Valley’s social landscape. Eventually, Jessie makes friends—Dri and Agnes—who convince her to buy a pair of inexpensive glasses. After, Jessie notes how the sunglasses “feel transformative, like I’m somehow a different person with large squares of plastic covering my face.” Buying and wearing her own pair of sunglasses signifies that she’s starting to fit in at Wood Valley and in Los Angeles more broadly, which makes her a much “different person” than she was two months ago, back when she was desperate to move back to Chicago and was uninterested in anything California had to offer.