Memory as a Constructed Refuge: A Theme Analysis of Sundial by Catriona Ward

The Thematic Claim: Memory as a Deliberate ConstructionnIn Sundial, Catriona Ward presents memory not as a faithful record of the past but as an active construction—a refuge characters build to shield themselves from truths too terrible to bear. The novel's central claim is that identity itself is assembled from these deliberate constructions: Rob's fictional boarding-school stories, Jack's gift of a fabricated mother, the click's genetic rewriting of personality, and Callie's bone collection all represent attempts to build a self that can survive the past. Yet the novel complicates this refuge: what protects also imprisons, and the walls characters build around their memories become the very cages they cannot escape. The sundial itself—a timepiece that only marks hours in sunlight—becomes the novel's governing image for how memory operates: visible only when illuminated, silent in shadow, and always subject to the angle of light. nn## The Arrowood Notebooks: Writing Over the PastnnRob's private Arrowood novels are the novel's most explicit example of memory as construction. In the opening chapter, Rob describes how she writes stories about her family—Rob, Irving, Callie, Annie, Jack, Mia, and Falcon—transplanted into a boarding-school world of betrayals, friendships, and whispered secrets. She changes all the character names at the end, and she is explicit about the purpose: none of these things happened, but the writing is, in her words, an act of remembrance. The notebooks are a place to go, a refuge where Rob can inhabit a version of her family that never existed. nnThe irony is layered. Rob's real past—the puppy farm, the cages, the wire—is so unbearable that she has suppressed it entirely. The Arrowood stories are not a record of what happened but a replacement for it. When she writes that everything clicks off and it is wonderful, like vanishing, she describes the refuge in terms of disappearance: the constructed memory allows her to vanish from her own history. The word clicks is significant, echoing the click of the genetic procedure that rewrote her brain, and the click of the dog controller—both mechanisms of control and erasure. nn## Jack's Letter: The Gift of a False MothernnThe novel's most devastating revelation comes in Jack's letter to Rob, which reframes the entire family history. Jack reveals that she and Rob were children kept in cages at the puppy farm run by Lina and Burt Grainger—whose real names were Jacqueline and Robert Grainger, the source of Rob and Jack's own names. The children were starved, fought for food, and watched others taken away. Rob killed Lina with wire and tried to kill Mia and Jack as well. Falcon and Mia figured out what the children were and used the click to make Rob a good dog. nnJack's letter is itself an act of memory construction. She writes that she tried to give Rob other memories, in place of the bad—a mother. This is the novel's clearest statement of the theme: memory as a deliberate gift, a refuge built by one person for another. Jack gave Rob a mother—Lily, who smelled of lilies—and a childhood at Sundial that never happened. The constructed memory is so successful that Rob believes she is the good one, and when Mia begins to reveal the truth, Rob's first response is denial: she insists that cannot be right, that she is the good one. nnBut the suppression is not complete. When Mia describes the wire, something stirs in Rob's memory—horrible tendrils, like maggots or worms. The maggots, already established as a symbol through Irving's fishing bait, become the image of suppressed memory stirring back to life. The refuge has cracks, and through them the truth seeps. nn## The Click: Rewriting the SelfnnThe click is the novel's most literal representation of memory as construction. Mia explains that the procedure edits DNA, cutting out the bad sections and replacing them with copies of good things. Rob imagines it as millions of tiny little scissors, busily cutting out shapes like a kid with paper chains. The click is memory engineering made biological: it does not just suppress memory but rewrites the very capacity for violence and fear. nnThe dogs at Sundial are the control group for this experiment. Mia's electrode system and the little cement bowler hats are a parallel to the click—both are technologies of behavioral control that reshape the subject's experience of the world. Twenty-Three, the rottweiler with the mutilated tail, runs in rectangles because Mia has made it very pleasurable for her to do so. The dog's identity is constructed by the controller, just as Rob's identity is constructed by the click. nnThe complexity here is that the click is both salvation and imprisonment. It made Rob normal, gave her a life, a family, a future. But it also made her a good dog—the language of the kennel applied to a human being. Jack, whose click started to go wrong, is the counter-example: she remembers, and her remembering makes her dangerous. The novel suggests that the refuge of forgetting is purchased at the cost of the self that might have been. nn## Callie's Bones: Memory Made MaterialnnCallie's collection of animal bones offers a different model of memory. Where Rob suppresses and Jack fabricates, Callie makes memory physical. She whitens bones with hydrogen peroxide, assembles them into portraits, and keeps them hidden in her backpack. When Rob confronts her, Callie says she has always done it with the bones, even before she actually did it, and that she knows who she is. nnThis is a striking claim. Callie's bones are not a refuge from identity but an assertion of it. She knows who she is—or believes she does. The bones are her way of processing death, of making it tangible and controllable. But the novel complicates this too. Callie's knowledge of herself is itself a construction. In the final chapters, we learn that Annie, not Callie, was the one who harmed animals and framed Callie for the medicine poisoning. Callie took the blame to protect her sister, and she reflects that she will have to protect Annie for the rest of her life. nnCallie's identity as the bad one is thus as constructed as Rob's identity as the good one. Both sisters build refuges—Rob from her past, Callie from her future. Callie's confession is a deliberate construction, a story she tells to shield Annie. The bones, which seemed to be evidence of Callie's darkness, are revealed to be part of a different story entirely. nn## The Sundial: Time and Its RefugesnnThe sundial itself is the novel's central symbol for memory and its construction. A sundial marks time, but only in sunlight; in shadow, it is silent. The same could be said of the characters' memories. Rob's past is hidden in shadow, only emerging when the light of truth falls on it. The sundial also marks the site of Rob's mother's grave—a grave that contains no body, since Rob acknowledges her mother is not really under there. The memorial is itself a construction, a marker for a memory that may not correspond to any real event. nnThe novel's structure reinforces this theme. The chapters alternate between Rob's present-tense narration and Callie's, with Jack's letter interrupting the flow. Each narrator constructs a different version of events, and the reader must assemble the truth from these competing constructions. The final revelation—that Annie was the culprit—forces a re-reading of everything that came before. The refuge of memory is shown to be fragile, permeable, and always under revision. nn## Complexity and ContradictionnnThe novel refuses to offer a simple moral about memory. The click that erased Rob's past also gave her a life. Jack's fabricated mother was a gift of love, even if it was a lie. Callie's false confession protected her sister, even as it condemned her in her mother's eyes. The refuge of constructed memory is not merely a defense against truth; it is also a form of care, a way of loving others by shielding them from what they cannot bear. nnBut the novel also shows the cost. Rob's constructed identity leaves her unable to recognize her own capacity for violence. Jack's remembering makes her an outcast, confined to Sundial. Callie's sacrifice means she will spend her life protecting a sister who may not deserve it. The refuge is never free; it is always built from something, and something is always lost in the building. nn## Study Questionsnn**1. How do Rob's Arrowood notebooks function as a constructed refuge, and what does the act of changing character names reveal about her relationship to memory?nnThe notebooks are Rob's private fictional world, where her family members become boarding-school characters in stories that never happened. Changing the names at the end is a deliberate act of distancing—she writes with real names to feel the connection, then erases them to avoid confronting the truth. The notebooks are an act of remembrance of things that never occurred, a refuge that replaces her actual past with a bearable fiction. nn2. In Jack's letter, she says she tried to give Rob other memories, in place of the bad—a mother. What does this reveal about the ethics of constructing memory for another person?nnJack's gift of a mother is an act of love and protection, but it is also a lie that shapes Rob's entire identity. The novel suggests that such constructions can be both compassionate and harmful—they shield the recipient from trauma but also prevent them from knowing themselves. Jack's letter is itself a breaking of the refuge, an attempt to give Rob the truth she was never allowed to have. nn3. How does the click function as both a literal and metaphorical mechanism of memory construction?nnLiterally, the click is a genetic procedure that edits DNA to remove bad traits and replace them with good ones. Metaphorically, it represents all the ways memory and identity are engineered—by parents, by institutions, by the stories we tell ourselves. The click makes Rob a good dog, but the language of the kennel reveals the cost: she is controlled, not freed. nn4. Callie says of her bones that she knows who she is. How does the final revelation about Annie complicate this claim?nnCallie's assertion of self-knowledge is undercut by the revelation that she took the blame for Annie's crimes. Her identity as the bad one is a construction she chose, to protect her sister. The bones, which seemed to be evidence of her darkness, are revealed to be part of a different story. Callie's knowledge of herself is as constructed as Rob's—both are refuges built from deliberate choices about what to reveal and what to hide. nn5. The sundial marks time but only in sunlight. How does this symbol reflect the novel's treatment of memory?**nnThe sundial is silent in shadow, just as the characters' memories are hidden until truth illuminates them. The sundial also marks a grave that contains no body—a memorial to a memory that may not be real. The symbol suggests that memory is not a fixed record but a construction that depends on light, on attention, on the willingness to look. When the light shifts, the memory changes.