This Must Be the Place

Content Warning: This section discusses death, grief, and trauma.

The reflections motif is peppered throughout the text and represents the duality of the self. A reflection offers two seemingly identical images of a person, but mirror images are inherently not identical. This sense of someone split in two is indicative of The Dissociative Nature of Trauma. At the beginning of the novel, Claudette can’t see Daniel clearly because “the glass is opaque with the reflections of clouds” (14)—the reflections of the past cloud Daniel’s judgment and create a gulf between Claudette and Daniel. When Niall and Phoebe drive to meet Daniel, Niall is “watching his rearview mirror” (65), as he watches the past throughout the novel. When Claudette is getting her makeup done in India, “she avoids the eye of the woman in the mirror: she resembles her yet is not her” (199), connecting her experience as an actress to dissociation.

Marithe sees her reflection in the bottom of the well just as Phoebe sees herself in the photo of Marithe—the reflection metaphor ties the girls together over space and time. When Daniel is in the worst phase of his grief over Phoebe, “he spends a great deal of time avoiding mirrors” to avoid facing his trauma and his response to it (297).