Turtles All the Way Down

Harold is Aza’s much-beloved car. Harold belonged to her father and when Aza turned 16, she spent all of her savings from babysitting and birthdays to get the car in running order. Though Aza has trouble expressing love for the humans in her life, she freely shows great love for Harold. Harold is a surrogate for Aza’s lost father, enclosing her in a feeling of protection and safety. Aza does not care that Harold does not run well, has a cassette tape stuck on the same song, and is almost as old as herself. Harold symbolizes the purity of Aza’s father’s memory, her idealized version of a father figure.

Aza wishes to protect Harold as well, admonishing Daisy for drinking milk while riding in Harold and for slamming his “precious” door. It is significant that Daisy is the only person Aza has given a key to Harold, showing that Daisy is the only person Aza trusts with such a cherished part of her life. Harold also holds Aza’s other treasured piece of her father: his cell phone. Aza does not keep the cell phone, with its pictures taken by her father, in her bedroom. When she is feeling in need of connection with her father, Aza goes to the embrace of Harold and looks through the cell phone photos.

The car accident severs Aza’s physical ties to her father. Harold and the cell phone are lost, and with them, Aza’s childhood relationship with her father. This is part of Aza’s coming of age. Aza grieves, noting that Harold’s last act of protection was keeping the passenger compartment intact while the rest of him was destroyed. Harold/her father saves her and Daisy.

The White River separates the sections of Indianapolis where Aza and Davis live. It represents a “right side/wrong side of the tracks” division between their lives. Aza’s side of the river floods regularly, and sewage from the city overflows when it rains. Davis’s more prosperous side of the river never floods. Aza and Davis’s upbringing and family situations have been dictated by what side of the river they grew up on.

Early in the story, Daisy tells a story about how the site of Indianapolis was chosen due to its proximity to the White River because all cities needed a waterway. It was then discovered that the river was too shallow for boats to navigate. Later, Aza likens herself to the White River, saying she is unnavigable. She means that she is a useless person and her mental illness makes her life unacceptable. Daisy reverses that idea, saying that Aza is the city, not the river. The people of Indianapolis managed to build a decent city on an inferior river. Daisy means that despite Aza’s mental illness, she is a good person with much to offer the world.

Daisy buys a college guide and shows it to Aza after they receive their newfound windfall from Davis. Once Daisy has seen the prices charged by colleges around the country, she shows her practicality by deciding she must go to their state university. Aza, on the other hand, reads through the college guide, imagining herself in various settings in liberal arts colleges around the country. This symbolizes Aza’s dreams of redefining herself, of dreaming of all the possible new selves she might discover. Aza is so bitterly unhappy with herself that the idea of reshaping herself in the beautiful places shown in the college guide is appealing.

As Aza’s mental state deteriorates, she chastises herself for ever having imagined that she could escape herself, for dreaming that she could go away to Amherst or any of the colleges shown in the guide. Aza thinks she must have been “crazy” to think she could go away from home to attend college, to have a job later in life, to have any different kind of life at all. Aza bitterly thinks that all the possible futures she envisioned while reading the college guide are unattainable. She believes that she has no future.

The title of the novel refers to the story Daisy tells Aza, about a professor who lectures on the origins of the earth and the universe. After the lecture, an old woman comments that the earth rests on the back of a giant turtle, which is in turn on the back of another turtle. The universe is turtles all the way down. This is a classic, mythological creation story that has been shared by different groups throughout ancient history.

This allegorical story symbolizes Aza’s search for identity and meaning in her life. She struggles greatly to find her “real” self in the midst of her internal struggles between her “selves.” She conceptualizes her search as a constant failure, as each time she thinks she is beginning to understand herself, she is disappointed. Aza compares this to opening up nesting dolls, only to find another hollow doll inside. She is on a never-ending search for the “solid doll,” her true self. Daisy’s story of the World Turtle demonstrates a fruitless search to Aza. There is no final, true self, so she should stop torturing herself with her search. The self is constantly evolving.