Cover of The White Darkness

The White Darkness

Geraldine McCaughrean

2 ideas

  1. Sym's Antarctic ordeal under Uncle Victor

    Fourteen-year-old Symone Wates, partially deaf and privately in love with the long-dead polar explorer Captain Lawrence Oates, is taken to Antarctica on a tourist expedition by Victor, a family friend she calls uncle. Victor is secretly determined to find Symmes' Hole, the supposed polar entrance to a hollow earth, and he sabotages the tour to strand the group and push inland. Sym ends up fighting to survive on the ice with a boy from the expedition while Victor's delusion drags everyone toward death.

  2. Imaginary companion as externalized inner voice

    Sym's constant conversations with her imagined Captain Oates work as a way to hold her own judgment at arm's length until she is ready to own it. When his voice warns her or steadies her, it is really her own suppressed perception speaking. Seen this way, a fantasy figure is less an escape from reality than a scaffold for courage and self-knowledge the person cannot yet claim directly.

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