Pearl DeWitt

Character Analysis

Our fifteen-year-old leading lady acts first and asks questions later. She's smart when it comes to her English homework, but she doesn't really think things through before making decisions. Pearl is impulsive and a little naïve. And while sometimes this gets her into minor scrapes, it also leads her into Dark Water's deadly climax. So let's take a look.

Eye Candy

According to Pearl, she's nothing special. She starts off the book by telling us so:

You wouldn't have noticed me before the fire unless you saw that my eyes, like a pair of socks chosen in the dark, don't match. One is blue and the other's brown, a genetic trait called heterochromia. (1.1)

Of course, after the fire, everyone knows who she is because she hung out in the woods instead of evacuating. Even before the fire, though, people are always talking about her eyes—so much as Pearl might believe she's unnoticeable, there's clearly something at least kind of distinctive about her. This is a good little metaphor for her personality: She feels like she's pretty ho-hum, but Pearl has a spark that inspires her to do her own thing.

Along this line, while Pearl's differently colored eyes might just be a genetic trait, Pearl likes to think of them as magical. She even gets weird feelings about stuff that hasn't happened yet, which she attributes to her eye. On the day of the fire, for instance, Pearl doesn't want her mom to go to work since she thinks something bad will happen. It turns out she is totally right. So hey, maybe she can see the future after all.

Here's one thing we know Pearl can see: Amiel. He might not be able to speak, and they might not share a language, and pretty much everyone she knows might think she has no business hanging out with an undocumented immigrant farm worker, but Pearl is able to see past these barriers. And when she does, she likes what she sees. A lot.

Love at First Flame

No amount of future seeing could prepare Pearl for what happens between her and Amiel, though. At first glance, she's intrigued, but as she spends more and more time with Amiel, she falls in love with the guy. It's no problem that he can't talk very much; she gets a kick out of the way they communicate anyway.

My arm trembled with each stroke until he reached the end of what he was writing and held still, my arm still propped in his arm, his breath near my left ear, his upper body bare. I waited, and he waited, and then he started again. (39.26)

Pearl talks about Amiel tracing words on her hand as if they were doing the deed. It's very sensual and exciting for her, which is pretty much true of all their interactions for her. However, much as we might credit Pearl with seeing past social barriers to let her feelings run wild for Amiel, we also recognize ways in which she's blinded by her attraction. After all, she heads into the woods during a fire to be with Amiel, risking her own life and creating the scenario that leads to her uncle's death in the process.

What's Love Got to Do With It?

We can't help but wonder whether everything is exciting with Amiel for Pearl because he's her first boyfriend. It seems like part of her attraction to him is just having a love to be around. She's sure that she loves him at the time, but later on, she's not so sure about what love really means. Check out what she says about the fire:

The fire engine passed. Then another. And another. I didn't raise my hand or step out of the trees. I did what I thought was to love him, and I followed Amiel back down the bank toward the sheltering reeds. (47.7)

Pearl decides that she wants to be with Amiel instead of anyone else during the fire. Sure, we get that—she's in love, after all—but notice that she says she stuck with him because she "thought" that was love, which makes it sound like it really wasn't. Insofar as Pearl puts herself in very real danger, we join her in questioning whether this decision was really an act of love. It was most definitely super reckless, that's for sure.

A Girl Has to Do What a Girl Has to Do

Despite looking back on the events surrounding Amiel and the fire a bit more critically, a year out from this disaster Pearl still has her eyes on the prize… a.k.a. Amiel. She continues to miss him, so she's been learning Spanish and is gearing up to head down to Mexico to look for him. Finally she seems to be using her head while following her heart, planning and preparing instead of acting on impulse. Because of this, as the book ends, we have our fingers crossed for Pearl. Maybe, just maybe, she'll get her man for good this time around.