Walk Two Moons

As a coming-of-age story, the novel explores a period of Sal’s life when she’s learning who she is, independent of her parents. Notably, however, her acts of self-assertion are in many instances still reflections of her relationships with others (just not her mother or father). For example, when Sal rejects her father’s attempts to explain how he met Mrs. Cadaver, she does so in a way that even she realizes is reminiscent of Phoebe: “I could still hear my own voice saying, ‘I don’t want to hear it.’ I sounded exactly like Phoebe” (88). This speaks to the basic nature of personal identity in the novel, where people of all ages construct themselves partly in response to their relationships with others.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. On the contrary, one of the main ways in which the novel’s characters come to understand their own thoughts and feelings is by comparing themselves to those around them. This dynamic is especially clear in Sal’s friendship with Phoebe, whom she describes as “act[ing] out the way [Sal] sometimes felt” (182); the more Sal watches Phoebe flounder in the wake of Mrs. Winterbottom’s disappearance, the better she recognizes the coping strategies she has been using since her own mother’s death. Characters may also take pride or comfort in their relationship to a broader group identity: Gram, for instance, remarks that courage is a “family trait” amongst Hiddles (13), and Sal and her mother aspire to be “brave and elegant” like their Seneca ancestors (54). Regardless of whether these kinds of generalizations are true, they provide a reference point characters can use when thinking about who they are and who they’d like to be.

In some cases, however, characters become so preoccupied with who they are in relation to others that they lose all sense of who they are as individuals. This is a particular danger for the novel’s female characters, because of the pressure they’re under to conform to an idealized notion of what it means to be a wife and mother. Here, for instance, are Sal’s thoughts on why Mrs. Winterbottom continues to do chores she obviously takes no pleasure in: “Why didn’t she tell [her family] to do some of these things themselves? Maybe she was afraid there would be no need for her and she would become invisible and no one would notice” (87). In other words, Mrs. Winterbottom’s identity is so intertwined with her role as a housewife that she fears abandoning that role would effectively mean ceasing to exist. Similarly, the loss of her long-awaited second pregnancy profoundly disrupts Sugar Hiddle’s sense of herself as a mother, and thus causes her to travel out west to forge a new identity for herself—one that doesn’t hinge entirely on her relationship to her family.

In fact, journeys as a motif are important for precisely this reason: When characters physically distance themselves from those they’re closest to, they often achieve the psychological distance they need to recreate or rediscover themselves. Notably, however, this distance isn’t intended to be permanent. Once Mrs. Winterbottom gains a firmer sense of who she is, she returns to her family and begins mending her relationships to her husband and children; Sugar would presumably have done the same if she hadn’t died en route to Idaho. The novel therefore affirms the importance of interpersonal relationships to personal identity, despite also finding some value in solitude as a means of self-discovery.

If the characters in the novel often construct their own identities in relation to other people, one of the primary ways they do so is through storytelling: By imagining themselves as another person (real or imaginary), characters often gain the emotional distance required to make sense of their own lives. The nested stories that comprise the novel’s structure illustrate this phenomenon, because the act of recounting Mrs. Winterbottom’s disappearance gradually allows Sal to come to terms with her own mother’s death. Likewise, characters often adapt the stories they hear in ways that personally resonate with their own feelings and experiences. Perhaps the best example of this is Sal’s addition to the myth of Pandora: By imagining a second box full of good things marred by worry, Sal reinforces the ideas she’s beginning to hold about happiness as a choice.

One potential danger of this kind of storytelling is that people may project their current preoccupations onto a narrative in an unreflective way. In doing so, Creech suggests, people use stories not as a means to facilitate understanding but rather to impede it; when Sal and Phoebe develop their theories about Mrs. Cadaver having kidnapped Mrs. Winterbottom, they’re using the power of narrative to obscure realities they’d rather not face (Sugar’s death and Mrs. Winterbottom’s dissatisfaction, respectively). That said, the novel reserves a place for even this kind of storytelling, which often serves as a stepping stone toward real knowledge; as Sal says, “for a while I needed to believe that my mother was not dead and that she would come back” (273).

A more serious problem arises when people become so wrapped up in the personal relevance of a narrative that they overlook another key function of storytelling: to offer a window into the experiences and perspectives of others. As Creech depicts it, empathy is in effect a form of storytelling; when Sal and Gramps play the “moccasin game,” they’re constructing narratives about what another person might be thinking or feeling. In this way, Sal comes to understand the motives of those around her in a more objective way. For instance, where Sal had previously viewed her mother’s desire to have more children through the lens of her own feelings of rejection, she eventually concludes that this was likely not what was motivating Sugar: “I am jealous that my mother had wanted more children. Wasn’t I enough? When I walk in her moccasins, though, I say, ‘If I were my mother, I might want more children—not because I don’t love my Salamanca, but because I love her so much. I want more of these.’” (274).

The common thread throughout these different kinds of storytelling is the idea of narrative as a way of understanding the world. This is one reason why mythology is such a prominent motif in the novel; myths often seek to explain aspects of life that are inherently difficult to comprehend, like the existence of death and suffering. Likewise, stories may or may not reveal the truth about a person, situation, etc., but they provide people with a way to navigate daily life.

The novel deals with several difficult and potentially bleak topics: the death of a parent, the loss of a child, infertility, mental illness, etc. Nevertheless, the novel’s tone is largely enthusiastic or even joyful, and it ends on a hopeful and forward-looking note: a widowed Gramps finds meaning and happiness in his interactions with Sal; John Hiddle makes peace with his wife’s death and takes Sal back to Bybanks; etc. Most importantly, while Sal acknowledges that she still feels pain over her mother’s death (and even some unresolved resentment surrounding her parents’ desire to have more children), she’s newly able to take pleasure in life’s pleasures: She reflects, “[F]or now, Gramps has his beagle, and I have a chicken and a singing tree, and that’s the way it is” (276), before concluding, “Huzza, huzza” (276). This adoption of Gram’s trademark expression of spontaneous delight is all the more significant given that Sal uses it to describe everyday life rather than (for example) her friends’ upcoming visit. The implication is that Sal chooses to find joy and fulfillment from moment to moment, even in what might seem ordinary and routine.

This decision to be happy is distinct from Sal’s earlier state of denial in that it’s an informed choice; it isn’t that Sal refuses to recognize how painful life can be, but rather that she chooses not to dwell on it. This idea is at the heart of one of the messages Mrs. Partridge leaves for Phoebe: “You can’t keep the birds of sadness from flying over your head, but you can keep them from nesting in your hair” (148). Sal uses the image of Pandora’s box to explain the difference, saying, “[B]ravery is looking Pandora’s box full in the eye as best you can, and then turning to the other box, the one with the smoothbeautiful folds inside: Momma kissing trees, my Gram saying, ‘Huzza, huzza,’ Gramps and his marriage bed” (273). It’s also worth noting that Sal wasn’t especially happy during the months she spent refusing to confront her mother’s death. Instead, she was anxious and irritable, in large part because of the effort it took to avoid thinking or talking about her mother.

In fact, Creech suggests throughout the novel that the refusal to face up to suffering makes happiness impossible. When Sal first hears the myth of Pandora, she concludes, “There must have been another box with all the good things in it” and that the “one bad thing” in that box must have been “Worry”: “Even when everything seems fine and good, I worry that something will go wrong and change everything” (168). The problem with this approach isn’t simply that it prevents Sal from enjoying things in the moment, but also that no amount of worrying can identify and avert every possible source of grief or pain; as Ben notes in English class, death might be “terrible,” but it’s also “normal” (175). Rather than “stay[ing] all locked up in the house” in an inevitably useless attempt to avoid suffering (252), the novel suggests people should accept life’s pain and unpredictability and then “go out and do things and see things” (252).