The Elephant Vanishes Water Analysis

The motif of water is used as a symbol in the novel, The Elephant Vanishes, which is crucial to this work. Water symbolises different ideas in the stories Sleep and The Elephant Vanishes. In Sleep, water symbolises the fear of the protagonist and has caused effects on the protagonist. However, in the story - The Elephant Vanishes, water is used to reinforce the idea that people in the town are aware of the disappearance of the elephant and express the sense of desolation.

In Sleep, water represents the fear of the protagonist. In the story, the protagonist is a housewife who spends seventeen days without sleep. In these seventeen days, she has a nightmare continuously where an old man pours water on her feet. Murakami starts the story with

“I could not feel the water. I could see it and hear it splashing down onto my feet, but I couldn’t feel a thing” . Later, the author suggests that the protagonist begins to fear because the pitcher never runs dry and states “I began to worry that my feet would eventually rot and melt away” . This is just the protagonist’s imagination. Murakami then states “When it occurred to me, my feet were going to rot and melt away, I couldn’t take it any longer” to show that protagonist’s fear. Later in the story, Murakami uses this to explain the idea that the protagonist is afraid of the water, which means she cannot distinguish between reality and dream. The protagonist is desperate to stop the water from pouring onto her feet. So, she later tries to halt the water by closing her eyes and screaming as hard as she can, but the water never leaves her body no matter how hard she tries. The author describes the water as “tearing through me, shutting down my heart. Everything inside my head turned white for a moment as the scream penetrated my every cell” . It feels like “something inside me died. Something melted away, leaving only a shuddering vacuum” . Here, it can be seen that the protagonist is afraid of water because the water that pours onto her feet is a form of torture.

Furthermore, the water has other unusual effects on the protagonist.

After waking up, she goes to the living room to drink a cup of brandy and read Anna Karenina until late morning. Murakami suggests that she does this because “I wanted to warm my body more, to calm my nerves down more” . Unfortunately, it has the opposite effect, which she stays up all night without feeling tired. She also has more energy than before. This continues for seventeen days. Later, Murakami states “Though the terror was leaving me, the trembling of my body would not stop” . Murakami states that the protagonist swims longer than usual, “I…swam my usual thirty minutes…I swam another fifteen minutes, ending with a crawl at maximum speed for two full lengths” . The protagonist does not feel tired, “I was out of breath, but still felt nothing but energy welling up inside my body” . Murakami here suggests that this is bizarre because usually she would not swim for this long and would feel tired after swimming. Later, “I ran the house without a thought in my head, feeding snacks to my son, chatting with my husband” . The protagonist would usually not talk to her husband because she does not like him. Later in the story, the protagonist gives up on sleep, “it occurred to me what a simple thing reality is, how easy it is to make it work” . This also shows that she has gone a significant change. Water in this story represents the fear of the protagonist, which causes trauma but eventually results in

positive effects on her life and relationships.

In the story, The Elephant Vanishes, the motif of water is used to represent the disappearance of something significant and special in people’s lives, such as the elephant. The protagonist in the story is obsessed with the missing elephant. Murakami begins with “Amid the endless surge and ebb of everyday life, interest in a missing elephant could not last forever” . The memory of the elephant gradually fades over a few months following its disappearance. The author later states “It had been raining that day from morning to night - the…misty rain that often falls at that time of year, washing away bit by bit the memories of summer burned into the earth” . Murakami then states “Coursing down the gutters, all those memories flowed into the sewers and rivers, to be carried to the deep dark ocean” . Symbolically, rain gradually washes away people’s memories of the elephant with the passing of time. The water here conveys the loss of something special.

The motif of water expresses a sense of desolation in The Elephant Vanishes through the impact of the elephant’s disappearance.

The empty elephant house is described as having “an air of doom and desolation that hung there like a huge, oppressive rain cloud” . Murakami uses the image of rain to express the sense of sadness. Later, Murakami states “A soundless rain went on falling outside the lounge’s panoramic window, the lights of the city sending blurry messages through the mist” . This description represents how the protagonist is putting force on the existence of a thing that is ruthless and corrosive. The author states that the protagonist starts their conversation with the missing elephant. However, Murakami states “I could see that the ice had melted and that the water was working its way through the cocktail like a tiny ocean current” . Murakami here is comparing the melting ice in the editor’s drink to the ocean to create an image of an atmosphere which dissolves in a force that is both insidious and veiled. In this story, water is a reflection of the vanishing and the idea of impermanence. It suggests the narrator’s sense of being unsettled by the world out of balance. Water is also a depiction of an action just like time wiping the memories as it passes and the sense of

desolation.

Using water as a symbol is a very powerful writing technique in The Elephant Vanishes. In Sleep, water represents the fear of the protagonist, which resolves into unusual and even positive effects for the protagonist. This fear comes from the nightmare she has. Even though the protagonist knows that this is just a dream that does not exist in reality at all, she is still frightened by it. In The Elephant Vanishes, Murakami uses water as a symbol to represent something significant and special in people’s lives and express the sense of desolation. Consequently, water as a symbol becomes vital in writing short stories in The Elephant Vanishes.