Dead Birds
Throughout Other
Voices, Other Rooms, our fine, feathered friends take quite the
beating. Birds, which can be symbols of freedom because they can defy gravity,
(unlike us poor earthbound human bein...
The Porch Columns
Skully's Landing, Joel's new home, has seen better days.
There's no better symbol of this than the porch columns that stand in the yard,
holding up nothing. Joel notices them from his bedroom windo...
The Bell
Like the porch columns, the bell in the backyard of Skully's
Landing is a reminder of the plantation's past, but with a slight difference.
It has the explicit memory of slavery built into it, becau...
Rooms
The title of the novel, Other
Voices, Other Rooms, is a little mysterious. There are some
clues to explaining it, however, in one of Joel's favorite methods of escaping
the terror of the present. W...