The Narwhal Tusk in Great Circle: Symbol Analysis

The Narwhal Tusk: A Relic of the Unknown and the Wild Within M. Shipstead's Great Circle weaves a dual narrative across a century, and one of its most resonant objects is a narwhal tusk. This seven-foot-long, spiraled horn first appears in the childhood of aviator Marian Graves, packed in a crate left by her absent father, and later resurfaces in the Malibu home of Adelaide Scott, where the actress Hadley Baxter encounters it. The tusk is not merely a curiosity; it is a concrete symbol that carries the novel's themes of parental loss, the allure of the unknown, and the tension between wildness and constraint. By tracing its appearances and the meanings it accrues, we see how an object can hold a life's contradictions—the desire for adventure, the ache of abandonment, and the impossibility of ever fully knowing another person or oneself. ## What the Tusk Literally Is A narwhal tusk is an elongated canine tooth that protrudes through the upper lip of male narwhals, spiraling counterclockwise and reaching lengths of up to ten feet. In the novel, Marian discovers the tusk among her father Addison Graves's belongings after his brief visit to Missoula, Montana. The evidence describes it as a “seven-foot-long, sharp-ended, spiraled animal horn wrapped in burlap and packed in a long tube all its own.” She props it in a corner behind the stove, where it leans like “the neglected staff of a sorcerer.” This description emphasizes its otherworldly quality—it is not a familiar household object but something exotic and almost magical. The tusk is a physical remnant of Addison's travels, a tangible piece of the world he inhabited and then left behind. ## The Tusk as a Link to the Absent Father For Marian, the tusk is inseparable from her father's mystery. She unpacks the crates herself after his departure, sorting through paintings, books, and souvenirs. The tusk stands out because it is inexplicable. She cannot imagine the scene in which her father acquired it—a bustling city, a lonely fishing village, a hot or cold place. This uncertainty fuels her desire to understand him. She reads voraciously from the books he left, including accounts of polar expeditions by Nansen, Amundsen, and Shackleton. When she comes across an etching of narwhals clashing their tusks in Arctic pack ice, she retrieves the horn and shows it to her uncle Wallace, asking if her father might have killed the whale. Wallace suggests he probably bought it, but the question lingers. The tusk becomes a conduit for Marian's imagination: by learning about the places her father read about, she hopes to know him. As the evidence notes, she decides that by reading all his books, “she will know what he knew. In a way, then, she will know him.” The tusk is the most vivid artifact of that quest—a physical object that connects her to a man who was mostly absence. ## The Tusk as a Symbol of the Wild and the Unknown The narwhal itself is a creature of extremes: it lives in Arctic waters, where darkness and light alternate in long cycles, and its tusk resembles a unicorn's horn, blurring the line between reality and myth. In the novel, the tusk represents the exotic, the faraway, and the untamed. Marian's childhood is marked by a longing for the poles, which she reads about with “gorging” appetite. The tusk is a piece of that frozen world, brought into her Montana cottage. It also symbolizes the wildness within Marian—her restless spirit, her refusal to be confined by domestic expectations. The tusk is sharp, spiraled, and dangerous, like the ambition that drives her to fly around the world. When she later becomes a pilot, she embodies that wildness, and the tusk stands as an early emblem of it. ## The Tusk's Recurrence in Adelaide Scott's Home Decades later, the tusk reappears in the present-day narrative. Hadley Baxter, the actress cast to play Marian in a film, visits Adelaide Scott, an elderly woman who knew Marian. In Adelaide's Malibu living room, Hadley notices the tusk mounted diagonally above the fireplace. Adelaide explains it is a narwhal tusk and that Addison Graves acquired it on his travels. She also mentions she has other souvenirs and books from the Graves family. This recurrence shifts the tusk's meaning. For Marian, it was a private, intimate object—a link to her father. For Adelaide, it is a piece of history, a conversation piece, and a relic of a story she is only partially telling. Hadley, in turn, sees it as a curiosity, a prop in the larger narrative she is trying to reconstruct. The tusk has moved from the private sphere of Marian's cottage to the public sphere of Adelaide's home, where it becomes part of the lore surrounding Marian's life. This transition underscores the novel's theme of the public versus private self: Marian's story is inevitably shaped by others' interpretations, and the tusk, once a personal talisman, becomes a symbol of how her life is curated and displayed. ## The Tusk and Thematic Connections The tusk weaves through several of the novel's central themes. It connects to freedom and constraint because it is a natural object that has been taken from its environment and repurposed as a possession. Marian's own life is similarly constrained by practicalities—fuel, airfields, weather—even as she seeks the freedom of flight. The tusk's spiral shape also evokes the great circles that define Marian's journey: the novel's opening chapters define a great circle as the largest circle on a sphere, and Marian's around-the-world flight is an attempt to close such a circle. The tusk's spiral is a visual echo of that geometric ideal, but it is also imperfect, just as Marian's flight is distorted by necessity. The tusk also speaks to identity and reinvention. Marian reinvents herself multiple times—as Martin Wallace, as Alice Root—but the tusk remains a constant from her childhood, a touchstone of her original self. It is a reminder that even as she changes, some part of her is rooted in the mystery of her father and the wildness he left behind. For Hadley, the tusk is part of her attempt to understand Marian, but it also reflects Hadley's own search for identity as an actress who is constantly performing. The theme of incompleteness and the elusiveness of truth is central to the tusk's meaning. Its origin is unknown—Marian never learns where her father got it, and Adelaide cannot provide a story. The tusk is a fragment of a larger narrative that can never be fully recovered. This mirrors the novel's structure, which presents Marian's logbook as a partial record and her fate as ambiguous until the final chapter. The tusk, like Marian's life, resists complete explanation. Finally, the tusk is a powerful symbol of parental loss and abandonment. It is one of the few tangible connections Marian has to her father, who left her and her brother Jamie in the care of their uncle. The tusk represents both the presence of the father (through his belongings) and his absence (he is never there to explain them). Marian's attempt to know her father through his books and objects is a way of coping with that loss, and the tusk is the most evocative of those objects. ## Study Questions and Answers 1. How does the narwhal tusk function as a symbol of Marian's relationship with her absent father? The tusk is a physical remnant of Addison Graves's travels, discovered by Marian in his crates. It is mysterious and unexplained, just as her father is. Marian uses it to imagine his life and to connect with him through the books he left. She wonders if he killed the narwhal, and Wallace's suggestion that he bought it does not resolve her curiosity. The tusk becomes a conduit for her desire to know her father, and by extension, to understand her own origins. It symbolizes the gap between what she knows and what she longs to know, and it anchors her emotional attachment to a man who was mostly absent. 2. In what ways does the tusk's meaning change when it appears in Adelaide Scott's home? In Marian's cottage, the tusk is a private, intimate object—a talisman of her father and her own wild dreams. In Adelaide's Malibu home, it becomes a public artifact, displayed above the fireplace and explained to Hadley as a piece of Graves family history. It is no longer a personal symbol but a relic of a story that others are trying to reconstruct. For Hadley, it is a curiosity that sparks questions about Marian's life, but it also underscores the incompleteness of that story. The tusk's shift from private to public mirrors the novel's exploration of how Marian's life is interpreted and curated by others, and how the truth of a person can be obscured by the narratives built around them. 3. How does the tusk connect to the novel's theme of freedom and constraint? The tusk is a natural object that has been removed from its Arctic environment and turned into a possession, illustrating the tension between wildness and domestication. Marian herself is a wild spirit who seeks freedom through flight, but she is constrained by practicalities—fuel, airfields, weather, and the expectations of others. The tusk's spiral shape also evokes the great circles that define her journey, but it is an imperfect spiral, just as her around-the-world flight is distorted by necessity. The tusk thus represents the ideal of freedom and the reality of constraint, and it serves as a reminder that even the most untamed impulses are shaped by the world's limitations. 4. What does the tusk reveal about the theme of incompleteness and the elusiveness of truth? The tusk's origin is never fully explained. Marian never learns where her father acquired it, and Adelaide cannot provide a story behind it. This lack of explanation makes the tusk a symbol of the novel's broader concern with incomplete knowledge. Marian's logbook is a partial record, her fate is uncertain until the end, and the film about her life is an interpretation rather than a definitive account. The tusk, like Marian's story, resists complete understanding. It is a fragment of a larger narrative that can never be fully recovered, and its presence in the novel reminds readers that truth is often elusive and that objects, like people, carry mysteries that cannot be fully resolved. ## Conclusion The narwhal tusk in Great Circle is a deceptively simple object that accumulates profound meaning across the novel's dual timelines. It begins as a child's discovery, a link to an absent father, and evolves into a symbol of the wild, the unknown, and the incomplete. Its recurrence in Adelaide's home shifts its significance from private to public, from personal talisman to historical relic. Through its appearances, the tusk illuminates the novel's central themes—parental loss, the pursuit of freedom, the construction of identity, and the elusiveness of truth. It is a testament to how objects can hold the weight of a life, even when that life remains partially hidden. For Marian, the tusk was a promise of adventure; for Hadley, it is a reminder that some stories can never be fully told. In both cases, it stands as a powerful emblem of the human desire to know and to be known, and the inevitable limits of that desire.