Crossing to Safety

Wallace Stegner

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1987

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Chapters 1-3

Part 1, Chapters 4-6

Part 1, Chapters 7-9

Part 1, Chapters 10-11

Part 1, Chapters 12-13

Part 2, Chapters 1-3

Part 2, Chapters 4-5

Part 3, Chapters 1-2

Part 3, Chapters 3-4

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Sally’s Crutches

Sally’s crutches, which she must use following her bout with polio, symbolize a negative, destructive sense of time and change, and with it, a certain powerlessness within these large, unavoidable changes. However, the crutches also represent the power to persist and struggle in these adverse conditions and acquire dignity and grace therein. Sally’s crutches embody the intrusion of reality within a story and a life dominated by fictionality and interiority. Sally retains the ability to speak and remember clearly what Larry can or will not. Of all the characters, she is the most grounded, as if her disability provides her a strength of character and a sense of reality that the others lack. Unlike Charity, she cannot delude herself within an illusory feeling of control over her surroundings and others. Unlike Sid, she can’t resent anyone else for not “allowing” her to be one thing or another. Unlike Larry, she will not seclude herself in her work to shut out the parts of life that challenge or frustrate her.

The Picnic

Charity’s birthday picnic is a ritual, whose meaning changes throughout the novel. The picnic itself, although seemingly benign, is an ambiguous symbol of the tension and conflicts in the novel. On one hand, it represents the wish to create meaning within a family and bring everyone into that shared meaning; on the other hand, it represents the desire and duplicitous attempt to impose one’s will, in the form of this benign shared activity. Externally, it seems like Charity is trying to impose her will on a situation where she has no control. Her terminal illness, and its implications in a life lived as hers, would suggest this. Moreover, both Sid and Larry imply that she is using this last wish to fulfill a demand of the ego. However, this is not the entire story. Charity is one of the few characters able to appreciate the value and precariousness of family, through her own. Her insistence upon these ostensibly empty family rituals—such as the picnic—is supported as much by the wish to not be seen as weak and powerless, as much by a sincere desire to protect something larger and more important than herself.

The Front Room of the Pensione Vespucci

In an obscure section of Part 2, Larry looks back on a point in his life, describing it through an extended metaphor: “For a long time it was dark, and all I could do was swim for my life. Union and consummation finally place in the fourth-floor front room of the Pensione Vespucci, an old palazzo on the Lungarno a little below the American consulate in Florence” (242). While the room itself is of little meaning, it has considerable symbolic value for Larry as well as for the novel’s main themes and conflicts. In the story, the Morgans and Langs are on a joint vacation to Europe, spending time in Florence. For Sid and Larry, this trip is not merely tourism but a pilgrimage to encounter an older and more substantive culture. The “ancient” culture of Italy represents the fulfillment of Sid and Larry’s ambitions in higher education and English Literature—seeking to reach back into tradition and history. Beyond this sentimental view of culture, the front room and this trip represent a phase in Larry’s life—a feeling of facility and security, with respect to the challenges and adversities he and Sally have undergone. This trip features evidence of a deepening relationship between Larry and Sally, one brought about by her affliction with polio. Larry begins to understand—belatedly—that his life has changed: “There, one September morning, it hit me that things were altogether other than what they had been for a long time,” yet in this modest room in an old palazzo, he has finally reached the “clear road” (242).