45 pages • 1 hour read
Steven RowleyThe Celebrants
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Drugs
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussions of drug overdose.
Drug use functions as a motif throughout The Celebrants, in both a sinister and casual manner. Based on the college origins of the friends’ relationship, they revisit drug use on occasion. Steven Rowley presents instances of the friends partaking in drugs as a casual activity between college friends. They smoke marijuana—which Naomi has stashed in Sur la Vie—during Marielle’s funeral and trip on mushrooms on the boat ride around New York City during Craig’s. These instances produce humorous as well as genuine conversations. Some instances and references to drug use are comedic. For example, Marielle meditates on the idea of psilocybin in mushrooms as a defense mechanism in the wild, and “[s]he imagined fawns and squirrels and foxes prancing about and communing while high as kites” (244). Like humor, Rowley also uses drug use to catalyze the group’s interactions in more serious circumstances: Marielle and Jordy reconcile after their argument while tripping on mushrooms, and the group contacts Alec via the Ouija board after smoking marijuana. The motif therefore relates to The Role of Dark Humor in Coping with Mortality.
References to drug use are both portrayed as casual and symptomatic of a cavalier disregard for life, given the way Alec died. During college, Alec was “in another league entirely” when it came to drug use, whereas “the rest of them partook as it suited them [...]. [T]heir drugs of choice differed and didn’t put their lives at imminent risk” (30). The remaining group members sometimes jokingly address their friends’ drug use, and Naomi eventually gives up drinking. During Craig’s funeral, Jordan quotes Ecclesiastes with some additions, and suggests that there is “[a] time to trip on mushrooms, a time to be sober” (256). Ultimately, drug use functions similarly to humor as a whole within the narrative structure of The Celebrants: as problematic if misused or casual and even catalyzing depending on the circumstances.
Communing with the Dead
References to communing with the dead recur as a motif throughout The Celebrants. The Ouija board incident is a central event in the novel, in which the group members attempt to contact Alec when plans for the structure of Marielle’s funeral stagnate. Similarly, Jordan “sees” Alec: “then he blinked, and the bartender was Alec. ‘Hey,’ Jordan said, legitimately happy to see him. ‘Hey yourself,’ Alec said in his happy-go-lucky Alec way” (264). Craig also relates a story—which turns out to be a fabrication—in which Alec’s ghost pushed him out of bed. These moments of communing with Alec provide indirect characterization. They portray more about those who commune with Alec than Alec himself: The board spelling “M-I-A” emphasizes Marielle’s uncertainty surrounding her parentage, Jordan being “happy to see” Alec portrays his desire to come to terms with death, and Craig imagining being punched reflects his need to radically change his life.
In addition to uncanny modes of contact, the group also communes with Alec by talking about him, particularly imagining what he would do in a given situation. For example, Marielle comments that he would have done the Alcatraz swim with Jordy because it would have been “too Courtney Love for him to resist” (287). Both the uncanny and reminiscence-based modes of communication enable the group members to process their feelings about Alec’s death and allow him to retain a spectral presence as a member of the group.
Art
Rowley addresses complex ideas of reality as opposed to representation through the motif of art throughout the novel. The central event related to art in the novel is Craig’s conviction for art fraud, through which Rowley addresses the complexities of what it means for art to be “real” and the stakes of deception. Art is also a significant part of Craig’s identity outside of his professional failings, as both an artist himself and as an art collector. Ultimately, Craig’s funeral enables him to reclaim and recreate his identity as an artist, which is a significant part of his character trajectory and underscores the theme of Identity Originating in Self Versus Others. His burning of the art represents a desire to start again with the way he represents himself.
The extent to which art represents or fails to represent life is another significant aspect of its symbolism throughout the novel. Early in the text, Jordan reflects on a “seascape” painting in Sur la Vie, which “was a shade too bright and too cheery for both their mood and the sea, but he had a certain fondness for it now that he saw the world as a darker place and welcomed a smattering of light” (8). While Jordan initially dislikes the painting, his perspective on it changes as his perspective on life changes: from being too bright to being a welcome departure from the darkness of life. The reference to Alec as “beauty and permanence, marble and stone, meant to stand and draw admirers for centuries” is also significant to art’s relationship to reality (25). Alec himself is described as representational art—sculpture—and his death initiates a departure from the group’s youthful feelings of invincibility and a movement toward their understanding of reality.
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By Steven Rowley
