Song for a Whale

Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2019

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-16

Chapters 17-32

Chapters 33-48

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Themes

Iris and the Whale: Singing Without Being Heard

Parallels between Blue 55’s experience and Iris’s are central to the novel. The frequency of Blue 55’s song and its unique patterning mean that no other whales can understand or communicate with him, including his own parents. Likewise, Iris’s deafness in a hearing school and a hearing family put her in a similar predicament. When Iris, who has spent two years in her school but still feels like the new girl, hears about the whale’s “swimming around for all those years, unable to communicate with anyone” (14), she can painfully relate to the whale’s experience. Until Andi sets her straight, she even imagines that Blue 55 might be deaf like her. While this isn’t the case, the chapters written from Blue 55’s perspective reveal that he has all the feelings of loneliness that Iris projects onto him. For example, just as Iris experiences people talking past her, as though she’s not there, the whale finds that his peers “communicated to one another past him, through him, across him. Like he was a coral reef or a kelp forest they passed by” (16). However, a crucial difference between the two is that Blue 55 wishes he were different and could communicate exactly like the other whales in the pods that pass him by, while Iris is comfortable in her deafness and expresses no wish to hear. Here, Kelly contrasts an animal’s need to warn his peers of predators and food with a marginalized girl’s embracing her difference.

Iris feels that she and the whale are on the same journey to find and understand each other, especially when she makes the 55-Hz symphony and dreams that Blue 55 sings to her in response. She defies the odds to track him down on his migration through Alaska, and her execution of the mission—despite her family’s opposition to it—gives her relationship with the whale the excitement of a you-and-me-against-the-world romance. Iris certainly feels that in meeting the whale, she’s approaching her soulmate.

However, she temporarily feels abandoned by him when he changes track and moves toward Oregon. Iris, who felt drawn to a creature in the world who could understand her, suddenly feels all alone, as though she’d made up a fantasy of her connection with the animal. Although she tries to change the course of her journey toward Oregon, when the odds against arriving on time mount, she accepts that she’s done her best to reach the whale and that her intention to let him know that he’s not alone must suffice. She can’t expect that a whale with his own logic and language would share her intention.

Her combination of acceptance and determination yields results when she spots the whale unexpectedly and dashes into the water to meet and even touch him. Iris wonders whether the whale recognizes her but decides that it doesn’t matter because she has physically reached him. While in earlier chapters Kelly endowed Blue 55 with human emotions that resembled Iris’s, in this chapter he remains an animal whom Iris treats with respect and grants his space. Kelly’s animal rights message won’t allow her protagonist to get carried away and impose her agenda on an animal. However, her handshape poem communicates that his song has reached her and brought her here to join him. The next chapter, from the whale’s perspective, reveals that Iris has delivered the “song he’d ached for” (268) and therefore the one that gave him permission to be himself.

The poignancy of Iris and Blue 55’s meeting lies in its temporariness. They’re two different creatures who must live in divergent terrains to survive. However, the vibration of the meeting stays with both and affects their lives: Iris grants herself the gift she gave the whale by transferring to a school where others understand her, and the whale regains hope that someone will communicate with him.

On a symbolic level, Iris’s association with whales begins at birth, when she’s named after the beached whale her grandparents found. While the sei whale was beyond help, Blue 55 provides a redemptive opportunity for both Grandma and Iris as they seek to enhance the quality of his life.

Self-reliance and Collaboration

Throughout, the novel builds tension between the opposing states of self-reliance and collaboration. Iris oscillates between the two states as she evolves from being an unheard, misunderstood girl who feels that changing her situation is hopeless to someone more confident, who can advocate for herself and help others.

From the outset, Iris relies on herself far more than the typical 12-year-old. This is partly a result of her disconnection from kids her own age and her inability to rely on the adults who misunderstand her. The death of Grandpa, her mentor and key connection to Deaf culture, limits the number of Deaf people she can communicate with to two and makes her feel more isolated. She distracts herself from her loneliness through her passion for electronic repairs. While Mr. Gunnar encourages her, this is mostly a solo venture for Iris, who gains confidence away from a school experience that makes her feel deficient and earns money that makes her less dependent on her parents. When Mom takes away Iris’s electronics to punish her for not resolving her issues with people at school, she chips away at Iris’s self-reliance. Away from her work and her one reliable friend, Wendell, Iris feels the vacuum of a lack of people in her life. Feeling that she has no one in the neighborhood to talk to, Iris looks up Blue 55 and contacts Andi about him. Thus, she reaches out to the wider world in a self-reliant manner.

Iris’s obsession with Blue 55 initially causes her to collaborate more, as she enlists the help of Wendell, Andi, and Mr. Russell’s music students to make her song. Because of the positive feedback and enthusiasm that others show for her project, Iris begins to trust them more and seek to communicate with them. However, when she fails to get her family to empathize sufficiently with the lonely whale—or, by extension, with her—she realizes that they can’t understand what it’s like “if your whole life” was being “in an ocean with no one to talk to” (107) and swings back to self-reliance. The oscillation between self-reliance and collaboration continues as Iris makes the journey to Alaska and enlists Grandma and Bennie in her efforts: Although she directs the mission herself, her character development trends toward increasing collaboration. She misses her family while she’s on the cruise ship, and her autonomy from them doesn’t feel as good as she’d anticipated. Moreover, when the whale changes course and it looks as though she’ll miss him, she draws comfort from having spent time with Grandma and helping her recover her resilience and joy after her bereavement. Still, Kelly lets the number of collaborators dwindle when Iris meets the whale, as Iris’s being there alone heightens the drama of their intense communion.

As Iris grows more confident and learns to trust her own judgment, she becomes flexible in determining her course of action, alternating between a narrow focus on her personal vision and bending to include others and accommodate their needs. Thus, Iris can more effectively deal with people as versatility replaces rigid individualism and the capacity to tolerate others ignoring her.

The Gap Between the Deaf and Hearing Worlds

The world of the novel presents the overlap of Deaf culture with the mainstream culture of the hearing majority. While Deaf people must live in both cultures, people who can hear have the luxury of ignoring the communication systems of those who are different from them. Both Iris, the only person who is Deaf in her hearing nuclear family, and Mom, who grew up the hearing child of two parents who were Deaf, have fallen into the gap between the Deaf and hearing cultures. While Mom was isolated because she felt left out of the Deaf culture of her parents and their strong community, Iris finds that she can’t communicate comfortably with the members of her hearing school and family and wishes for a Deaf community. However, the novel concentrates on Iris’s experience of isolation and shows how while Mom can “decide” to speak Iris’s language, as a hearing person, she doesn’t have to “unless you decide to” (279). For Iris however, as a person who is Deaf, sign language is the best way she can express herself. As a result, Iris’s expressive capacities would grow if she were permitted to learn amongst ASL speakers. Iris’s key challenge in the novel is making Mom, with her hearing privilege, understand this.

Rather than making Iris’s antagonist a bully, Kelly chooses Nina, whose intent to be helpful fails and ends in interference. Kelly may feel that while as a society we have mostly moved beyond prejudicial attacks against those with disabilities, hearing people still have patronizing attitudes toward those who are Deaf. Nina’s mistake is imagining that she can communicate fully in sign language after reading a single library book on the topic—and, by extension, thinking that she knows what it’s like to be Deaf like Iris. Adults inexperienced in teaching children who are Deaf believe Nina over Iris because they can more easily communicate with Nina. This situation shows how, ironically, despite having an additional sense, hearing people are often bad at listening to people who are Deaf and understanding them. Iris’s interactions with both Nina and Mom show how the worst mistake that hearing people can make is to act on assumptions about those who are Deaf instead of asking questions and paying attention to their responses. For example, Mom doesn’t listen to Iris’s accounts of friendlessness and instead lives in her preferred fantasy of Iris going to a neighborhood school surrounded by friends. While Iris’s first-person perspective communicates how annoying such behaviors are, Kelly provides another interpretation through Bennie, who suggests that Nina’s attempts at sign language are a step in the right direction and compares them with Iris’s attempts to communicate with the whale. By offering both perspectives, Kelly doesn’t interpret Nina’s behavior.

While Kelly shows bad interactions between people who are Deaf and those who can hear, she features some constructive interactions too. Wendell’s hearing family, who are all fluent in sign language despite having no genetic history of deafness, are an exemplary model for how to make a Deaf child feel at home. Bennie’s open, curious approach and willingness to improvise in how she communicates with Iris makes Iris feel like an equal participant in the conversation rather than someone to whom others talk down. This approach to communicating enables the girls to laugh about misunderstandings and mistakes, as the focus shifts from conveying information precisely to belonging and empathy.