55 pages • 1 hour read
Katherine CenterThe Bodyguard
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A 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
Hannah’s Safety Pin
Content Warning: This section features discussions of domestic violence.
Hannah’s beaded safety pin is a sentimental possession that she keeps with her at all times to comfort herself after her mother’s death. Made when she was seven, the year her father left, the pin was originally meant to be a gift for her mother. However, the night Hannah plans to give the pin to her mother is the same night her mother’s boyfriend begins to abuse her mother, and Hannah hides in her closet all night, forgetting about the pin. After her mother’s death, over 20 years later, Hannah finds the pin hidden away in her mother’s jewelry box and attaches it to a chain so she can wear it every day.
At first, the pin seems like a good luck charm for Hannah, and the term “safety pin” takes on an almost literal significance, for every time she touches the pin, she feels a much-needed boost of confidence, comfort, or security. And just as the safety pin comes to represent emotional security, its loss likewise represents the early loss of Hannah’s sense of personal safety when she was a child. She tells Jack that on the night her mother was beaten, she “didn’t feel safe anymore” (284), a feeling that coincided with the original loss of the pin. Accordingly, the second time the pin is lost at the river, Hannah is also grasping to recover the sense of safety she lost during her assignment with Jack. Prior to this assignment, Hannah was only able to find security in her job and the role she had to play as a bodyguard, both of which gave her an artificial sense of control over her life. Yet as she begins to have feelings for Jack, she struggles with this uncomfortable new perspective on the world. When Jack returns the safety pin to her—significantly attached to his own good luck charm and reminder of his past, Drew’s necklace—Hannah is finally able to let go of her fears and embrace the life she wants, realizing that she can feel safety and security in a relationship with Jack.
The Brazos River
The Brazos River is the site of many pivotal moments in The Bodyguard, both in the main plotline of the novel and in Jack’s past. Its full name is el Río de los Brazos de Dios, meaning “the river of the arms of God.” Jack explains the double meaning of this name, saying that although many people think the name reflects the river’s welcoming appearance, the name actually signifies the many people it has pulled to their deaths. After his fight with Hank, when Jack goes down to the river, wanting to be alone after being reminded of the part he played in Drew’s death, it is implied that the river in which Drew drowned was the Brazos. Thus, it is meaningful that Jack continues to return to the river even when his recurring nightmares depict his own death in the Brazos. In this way, the Brazos symbolizes Jack’s survivor’s guilt and his refusal to forgive himself or forget what happened to Drew. Just as Jack does one good deed a day to make up for the wrongs that he believes he has done, he also returns to the river to remind himself of the accident, an act that takes on a new tone of self-flagellation immediately in the wake of his brother’s anger and accusations.
When Hannah first approaches the Brazos, she takes a moment to relax by it, and it is one of her first times loosening up since the beginning of the novel. For Hannah, the Brazos appears to be welcoming, so much so that she is nearly swept away by its current, to Jack’s great horror. The way Jack reacts to Hannah’s near-drowning is so contrary to his usual laid-back manner that the intensity of his emotion reveals just how much of himself and his past he has kept from her. Yet in literature, bodies of water are also frequently symbolic of cleansing and new beginnings, and this also proves to be true of Katherine Center’s depiction of the Brazos, for Hannah’s near-drowning begins a new side of her relationship with Jack, as the encounter with the river’s dangers cause them both to open up to one another for the first time. Whereas Hannah sees the anger and self-loathing that Jack has been hiding, Jack sees Hannah’s emotional insecurity when she loses her safety pin. Likewise, Jack’s subsequent search for the safety pin along the river also shows how much he cares for Hannah, as he forces himself to return daily to the site of his greatest tragedy in order to restore her sense of safety.
The Ranch
The Stapletons’ ranch outside of Houston is renowned for its beauty but represents vastly different things for Hannah and Jack. Though she denies it at first, Hannah eventually begins to feel like her stay at the ranch is as much of a paid vacation as her co-workers say it is. Modeled on the cattle ranch of Center’s grandparents, the ranch becomes an idyllic and relaxing place for Hannah, symbolizing the loving family that resides there. Her regret when she has to leave shows just how much she has come to feel like a part of the Stapleton family, for while there, she experiences the love and safety that she has always longed for. This dynamic also leads her to see Jack for who he really is, not the celebrity she thought he would be, and thus the ranch becomes a place where she begins to recognize her own faults and realize that she needs to stop running from her past.
For Jack, however, the ranch and its proximity to the Brazos River symbolize the rift that has grown between him and his family ever since the accident. The setting also highlights the painful absence of his younger brother, and thus, Jack feels like the black sheep of his family, especially since Drew was the one with whom he was closest. To further emphasize his isolation from the family closeness that the ranch represents, he has not been back to the ranch since Drew’s funeral. Returning to the ranch only forces Jack to think about the grief, guilt, and the past he has been trying to avoid, and this trend intensifies once Connie forces the entire family to move back in under the same roof. For both Jack and Hannah, their time at the family-centered ranch brings back issues from their past, forcing them both to confront the ugly truths they had been avoiding. Yet the ranch also symbolizes stability and family, and Hannah and Jack ultimately move to the property to start their married life once they have confronted their pasts and are able to move forward together.
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By Katherine Center
