Night Fisher

“Night Fisher” bounces back and forth between the extremes of the scientific and the artistic. Topographical maps, sine waves, and knot diagrams are juxtaposed with fantasy images like the drug hallucinations (page 48), an imagined stripping sequence (page 85), and the memories of night-fishing with Shane where things look like they’re exploding and stars are falling (pages 18-19). Sometimes the two concepts merge in the eyes of Loren (a brief aside: I was struck by how Loren doesn’t really have eyes for a significant part of the story – he is usually drawn in such a way that his glasses appear to be opaque white circles, with the eyes hidden behind them. It creates a spooky effect, especially in panels where the rest of his face is in shadow, reminding me of diving goggles or a gas mask. It also is a visual reflection of the way in which he sees the world). On page 69, he sees his calculus test as a fishing scene, and on pages 126 and 127, he sees tourists in a market as different species of plants.

This plant/human image returns to a metaphor that is played with throughout the story in different ways. It takes place in Hawaii, which possesses some of the most unique and celebrated flora, so it is fitting that the novel brings into play the plant motif. In the beginning of the novel, Loren describes how his father struggles to fix up their overgrown yard and crooked trees; he puts it: “Just trying to recapture the front” (13). There is one palm in particular which grows the wrong way and resists all the efforts of the father to straighten it. In a sense, the tree is Loren, who is always being pulled and prodded academically by his father. Building on that, on page 97 there are three panels showing Loren’s father in his office placed in the middle of a scene where Loren goes out with Shane to get high. Over the course of the three panels the potted plants in the father’s office gradually grow taller and wilder while the father remains stationary, with his head in his hands. The plants are a metaphor for Loren, who is steadily becoming more and more out of control.

In another sense, Loren is like one of the migrant plant species that his biology teacher lectures about, which traveled to the island over thousands of years accidentally, through air currents or bird droppings. Loren is a migrant species too, who drifted from Boston to take root on Maui. But another theme in the novel is the reverse kind of Diaspora: people moving away from Hawaii, or those longing to get off the island. Loren narrates how over 60,000 Hawaiians have moved to Las Vegas for the same jobs, and images of empty luxury spas and abandoned travel agencies. This is the root of strange, lonely mood that permeates the entire book – the irony of an isolated paradise that people are trying to escape from. Metaphorically, it is fitting that this is the setting for a high school coming-of-age tale, because teenagers often feel like they are islands themselves.