The Owl Collection: Silent Witnesses and Tools of Resistance in The Emperor of Gladness

What Literally Is the Owl Collection?

Grazina Vitkus’s home at 16 Hubbard Street contains dozens of owl figurines and salt‑and‑pepper shakers in a variety of materials—wood, resin, plastic, ceramic. They crowd the china cabinet, mantelpiece, and tables. Some are Romanian, with tiny skeptical eyes; others are American, with more open faces. One owl is a cuckoo clock whose headless body emerges to mark the hour. Grazina’s husband Jonas also hoarded objects, but the owls are uniquely hers—collected long before the novel begins, brought from Lithuania or acquired during her decades in New England.

Where the Owls Recur

The owls appear most prominently in the middle third of the novel, when Hai’s bond with Grazina deepens and her dementia accelerates. After her forced removal to Hamilton Home, the collection remains in the empty house, symbolising her absent presence.

How the Meaning Shifts

1. Companions Against Loneliness

Grazina explicitly tells Hai that she talks to the owls because “I’m lonely old lady.” They fill the silence of a house where her daughter rarely visits and her husband is dead. The quiet wisdom of owls—creatures associated with vigilance and nocturnal insight—offers her a form of companionship that demands nothing in return.

2. Memory Anchors in Fading Cognition

Dementia erases Grazina’s grasp on the present. The owls become tactile anchors: she presses them to her cheek, rocks them, and arranges them in patterns. When she loses a tooth, she holds up a Fig Newton with the tooth stuck in it and asks “Now what?”—as if the owl‑filled room can supply an answer. The collection provides a stable sensory world when her internal one dissolves.

3. Bridges for Shared Grief and Storytelling

In Chapter 21, Hai picks up two owls and animates them as himself and his dead friend Noah. Grazina joins the game, letting the owls speak for her own losses. The figurines let both characters articulate grief without direct confession. Hai says, “Somebody goes ahead and dies and all of a sudden you become a box for them … your head a coffin to keep memories of the dead alive.” The owls become temporary receptacles for that box, allowing memory to be held and passed.

4. Weapons of Resistance

When Lucas and a nurse come to institutionalise Grazina, she and Hai stage a “war fantasy.” Hai slips her an owl salt shaker from the collection, and she flings it at the cabinet above the nurse’s head, then a pepper shaker that explodes on the tiles. The owls, once symbols of silent wisdom, become tools of defiance—fragile but effective in buying time. This moment literalises the novel’s theme of deception and truth: Grazina’s performance of madness (or genuine confusion) weaponises domestic objects to protect her chosen home.

5. Quiet Mourning and Continuity

After Grazina returns from the nursing home, she immediately grabs a plastic barn owl and coos into it. The owl collection outlasts her temporary absence; it remains, waiting. Later, when she is permanently taken away, Hai cradles a resin owl by her feet as they rock together. The objects absorb the grief that cannot be spoken aloud.

Character and Theme Connections

Grazina Vitkus: The owls are an extension of her identity—Lithuanian, practical, stubbornly hopeful. She collects them because “owls are smart” and because they remind her of the owl‑girl Marta, a childhood friend who was “too fat to fly.” Marta’s story mirrors Grazina’s own vulnerability: a slow swimmer surrounded by fish (the miner’s son’s hands) that were actually predators. The owls thus encode her survivor’s memory of wartime trauma.

Hai: Through the owls, Hai learns to listen and to care. His games with the figurines allow him to confess his grief over Noah’s death—a grief he cannot share with his mother. The owls become a non‑judgmental audience for his story of trauma and healing.

Noah (via imagination): Although Noah is dead before the novel begins, the owl dialogue in Chapter 21 resurrects him as a voice. Hai creates an entire imagined conversation about having a daughter, teaching her to shoot, and becoming “that worried gay uncle.” The owls bridge the gap between the living and the dead, making absence present.

Themes:

• Survival through chosen family: Hai and Grazina form a makeshift family held together by rituals involving the owls.
• Memory and historical erasure: The owls preserve Grazina’s past even as her mind loses it.
• Beauty in decay: The collection is chipped, faded, and absurd—yet it glows with purpose in the crumbling house.

Study Questions with Answers

1. Why does Grazina own so many owl figurines, and what does that reveal about her character?

Grazina collects owls because they represent watchfulness, wisdom, and survival—qualities she needed as a Lithuanian refugee and now as an isolated elderly woman. She tells Hai that Romanian owls have “tiny eyes, skeptical” while American owls have “more open faces,” showing she reads national character into the objects. Her hoarding of owls fills the emotional void left by her absent children and dead husband. The collection reveals her need for silent companions who never leave, contrast the human abandonment she has endured.

2. How do the owls function as a tool for Hai to process his grief over Noah?

In Chapter 21, Hai picks up two owls and gives them voices to recount his friendship with Noah—driving aimlessly, swimming in rainwater on a bus roof, sitting under a metal slide. The owls let him speak in a voice that is neither fully his nor fully Noah’s; they create a safe space for memory. He later says, “Your head a coffin to keep memories of the dead alive.” The owls become temporary monuments that allow the grief to be held, examined, and released without overwhelming him.

3. In what way do the owl salt‑and‑pepper shakers become weapons, and what does that moment tell us about the novel’s view of power?

When Lucas and the nurse attempt to take Grazina away, Hai slips her an owl shaker and she throws it “at the cabinet above the counselor’s head—where it shattered.” The shaker, a domestic object, becomes a grenade in their improvised war game. This moment inverts power: an old woman and a homeless teenager defeat official authority through theatrical defiance. It shows that power can be seized through creativity, shared performance, and the repurposing of everyday objects—key ideas in the novel’s deception and truth theme.

4. How does the owl collection connect to the novel’s epigraphs from Hamlet and Wallace Stevens?

The Hamlet epigraph declares “Your worm is your only emperor,” while Stevens’s line urges “Let be be finale of seem.” The owls, as objects that watch but remain silent, embody the tension between mortality and the drive to persist. Grazina’s collection is a hoard against the worm’s inevitable reign—each figurine a tiny act of “being” rather than “seeming.” Unlike the false appearances that the Stevens line condemns, the owls are honest totems of decay: chipped, faded, and yet stubbornly present. They literalise the idea that even in a world ruled by worms and ice‑cream, we can create fragile, meaningful structures of care.