The Volcano

The thing about a volcano is that tons of pressure builds up, little by little, out of sight, until one day, boom, the whole thing just blows.

That makes the volcano a perfect symbol for someone who struggles with internal demons and hides them from everyone else until the pressure is so intense it just erupts. The analogy gives us insight into how the most extreme forms of mental illness feel to someone actually suffering through them.

For years, Deborah has carefully crafted an outward appearance to make herself look normal, but she's spent a lot of time in her secret private world of Yr. When these two worlds battle it out for her attention, the core of the "volcano" that hides her true inner self comes close to bursting through. She tells Dr. Fried: "The illness is the volcano: she will have to decorate the slopes herself" (10.39).

Things get a lot worse before they get better. But at least once Deborah is diagnosed, her volcano gets one step closer to being mapped out: "The fact of this mental illness was in the open now, but the disease itself had roots still as deeply hidden as the white core of a volcano whose slopes are camouflaged in wooded green. Somewhere under the volcano itself, was the buried seed of will and strength" (3.54).

Deep inside of Deborah is an identity she keeps hidden, for lots of reasons. She's afraid she won't be accepted for who she is, and she's afraid she'll be shunned because she's crazy. So she tries hard, and not always successfully, to keep her outer self—"the slopes"—looking "green" and normal, while the hot core of the volcano deep inside her waits for the chance to erupt one day.

Watch out. It will.

The Magma Gathers

Things start to get worse after Deborah learns about Doris Rivera. Carla explains to Deborah that Doris makes the patients panic because she represents hope for their recovery, Deborah herself panics: "I am now what I was in the world—a motionless mountain whose inner part is a volcano" (9.83). Deborah still feels like she has a secretive molten center about to explode.

Then, when Dr. Fried is on vacation and Deborah is having therapy sessions with Dr. Royson, who annoys her with his cold logic and bland vanilla personality, Deborah starts to regresses severely. She made a lot of progress with Dr. Fried in almost two years of work, but she quickly backslides into Yr and its belief systems.

The meetings with Dr. Royson continue, but they don't go well, and Deborah gets worse and worse: "Slowly a volcano began to form beneath her still and mask-like face, and as more days dragged by, voices and counter-voices, hates, hungers, and long terrors began to seethe within its stony depths. The heat of them grew and mounted" (19.45).

Yep, this girl's on her way to exploding again. And can you blame her?

Megacolossal on the VEI

Heeding Idat's advice that fire can sometimes put out a fire, Deborah starts burning herself with cigarettes to control the burning volcano she feels erupting inside of her beneath the surface. We guess there's a certain logic to that, but of course it doesn't work: "The volcano only burned hotter behind the stone face and body" (19.53). She continues the futile burning of her arm with cigarettes for a while, but it's only effective at "easing the pressure of the stifled volcano inside her" (20.1).

Seriously, this sucker is referred to so often, we just know it's going to be significant when it finally erupts.

And erupt it does. And it's bad: "When the volcano erupted at last, there was no backfire in the matchbooks that was big enough to stave it off" (21.1).

Yeah, when Deborah's biggest meltdown comes, it truly is a volcanic eruption. Despite meds, therapy, and a hefty dose of solitude, she still snaps and bangs her head against the tiles of the bathroom floor until "[t]he black in her mind went red, swelling and growing out of her so far that before she knew it she was engulfed in the furious anger of eruption" (21.2).

Ouch, and double ouch.

But, you know, we're almost relieved when this happens. The release isn't pretty, and it sure sounds painful, but it's somehow necessary. That energy has to go somewhere; the pressure has been building inside Deborah for so long. Eruptions are violent, but hey, sometimes in nature, islands are created from all that volcanic ash.

Hawaii is a beautiful place, right?

The Volcanic Breakthrough

The volcano continues to erupt as Deborah discovers who she is.

Deborah's transition to spending more time in the real world is a messy one. There are times when the eruptions that occur from the Earth-Yr collisions are so intense that Deborah needs two cold-sheet packs a day just to calm down. Sometimes the eruptions send her running down hallways into doors.

But for all the violence of the eruptions, there is some amazing progress going on. Once Deborah's not holding back her true self anymore and not shoving it deep down into the core of her volcano, she starts being real with the world outside herself for the first time since she was five.

This is a huge breakthrough.

After these initial explosions, Deborah finds she doesn't need to work on decorating the outside slopes of her volcano anymore. Her facial expression is now real, and she is more authentically interacting with people. Dr. Fried points this out to her: "[W]hen this volcano of yours broke, something else broke, too: your stoniness of expression. One sees you now reacting and living by looking at your face" (22.10).

Deborah's not bottled up anymore. She can share her real feelings, and her outside finally matches her inside. Way to go, Krakatoa.