The Whisper Man

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue and Part 1, Chapters 1-7

Part 2, Chapters 8-14

Part 2, Chapters 15-21

Part 3, Chapters 22-30

Part 3, Chapters 31-35

Part 4, Chapters 36-42

Part 4, Chapters 43-52

Part 5, Chapters 53-58

Part 5, Chapters 59-66

Part 6, Chapters 67-70

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Imaginary Friends

Throughout the novel, Jake interacts with an imaginary friend, a young girl about his age in a blue dress. In a few instances, he also interacts with a character who he calls “the boy in the floor” (100). Jake’s imaginary friends are a misdirection—it’s implied that a supernatural element may be at work in the story, though eventually Jake’s interactions are explained as an outgrowth of his knowledge about his mother’s childhood and his interactions with Francis Carter. In each case, the imaginary friends represent Jake’s attempts to cope with trauma and the adult world, as he often relegates the things he fears to conversations with his imagined companions.

Toward the story’s end, another imaginary friend enters: Mister Night, the one that Tom had as a child, who the narrative reveals represents his father’s late-night visits to see his son. In the novel’s closing pages, Jake talks to an imaginary figure that represents Pete. Each of these imagined figures represents loss and the struggle with grief; they’re “ghosts” only in that they stand in for people that the characters have lost.

The Corpse Moth

The corpse moth is a rare type of butterfly that appears throughout the story. This butterfly is a clue in that the species commonly feeds on rotting flesh and is found near Tony Smith’s body. In addition, the corpse moth symbolizes danger, metamorphosis, and threatened innocence.

Francis Carter’s interest in the insects stems from their connection with his father’s killings, and he gives Jake a drawing of one as a way of grooming him for abduction. The younger Carter sees his kidnapping victims as boys who need rescue, like he did from his father, and his goal in taking them is to give them the safety to grow into something beautiful, though Francis is incapable of caring for them due to his own trauma. In this way, the butterflies represent Francis’s internal struggle to be something beautiful while still satiating his darker impulses.

Dreams

Jake, Tom, and Pete all suffer from recurring dreams, and each of these dreams recreates a traumatic event in their lives: Jake finding his mother’s body, Tom seeing his father’s last violent encounter with his mother, and Pete’s discovery of the boys Frank Carter murdered. The writing style shifts when describing these dreams, relying on repeating, choppy, imagistic writing, a representation of dream logic that is notably absent from Pete’s dream, which plays out like a standard scene. For Pete, that punctuated, repetitive writing describes his everyday waking life, suggesting the result of failing to address trauma: the past becomes increasingly real as the present fades.

Pete makes the role of dreams explicit in the story when he tells Jake that “bad dreams can be a way of dealing with [bad events]. Breaking it all down into smaller and smaller pieces, until eventually there’s nothing left anymore” (269), which, again, the style in which the dreams are written reinforces. The novel, however, disagrees with Pete’s notion that they fade away naturally. For each character, a dream fades only after the character confronts its cause, suggesting the healing power of looking one’s trauma in the face. Pete finds Tony Smith and can therefore put his unfinished business away; Tom reckons with his father’s version of events of that night and admits that his dream is more of an emotional reality than the factual truth; Jake must recreate his dream when he descends the stairs to call out for rescue from his kidnapper.