Waiting for Time

A detailed Summary of Waiting for Time

A fish can symbolize many different things such as sensitivity, knowledge and also has a famous representation of Jesus Christ in the Christian religion, but it's the symbolism of the fish in Lav's dreams in "Waiting for time" that is the topic of this essay.

At the beginning of "Waiting for Time" the reader sees Lav as a well off young lady without many troubles in this world, but there is one thing that troubles her very much and that's the lack of knowledge she has of her past. She has a lot of questions that she wants answered about her past and her mother doesn't help much. Lav wants to find her way back home to where she was born.

Lav gets a job in Newfoundland, she sees this as an opportunity to find her roots. It is when she is on the plane that the reader first hears of her fish dreams but the reader also knows that this is not the first time that Lav has had these dreams about fish, or to be more precise salmon. At first you wouldn't think that these dreams really meant anything besides the fact she was going to Newfoundland to do a report on fish. It wasn't till nearly the end of the book that I really caught the meaning of the dreams that Lav was having about salmon. If i

Lav continues to have these dreams when she's in St. Johns but now there getting kind of weird, because now as the salmon swims its swimming through and past obstacles. As she says "All night her ageing salmon swims, first through shifting, weed filed sludge, then through computer printouts, along watery pathways that rattle with the tap of keyboards smelling of formaldehyde"(40) and it is when she dreams about the fish swimming through all these obstacles that you know that this salmon in Lav's dreams is a representation of Lav herself and her work and she realizes this to. The salmon swimming through all these obstacles to get to her spawning grounds represents Lav trying to get through all the obstacles she has to over come, such as finding her relatives and her relations and juggling work in the midst of doing all this to find her own spawning ground which is Cape Random, before she gets too old to do so, cause as she says the salmon is ageing and running out of time.

There's one thing though that lav does that doesn't exactly match the salmon and that is having sex with Wayne Drover and getting pregnant in St. Johns, this isn't her original home or what you can call her spawning grounds.

When Lav makes it to Cape Random, she no longer has the dreams of the fish trying to make it to the spawning grounds. The symbolic meaning of this that I understood is that the dreams stoped because the fish is Lav and Lav is no longer searching for her spawning grounds so neither is the salmon, they both made it to where they wanted to go, their spawning grounds. Now that Lav has made it to her Spawning grounds just like a salmon she has her child exactly where she was brought into this world, " the very bit of sand where she had been spawned"(35).

Bernice Morgan uses the perfect fish to symbolize Lav Andrews. The salmon in Lav's dreams and everything the salmon swims through symbolize Lav's life and what she is going through in order to find out about her past and to get

Some common words found in the essay are:
St Johns, Christ Christian, Lav Andrews, Cape Random, Lav Lav, Lav Lived, Lav Spawning, Bernice Morgan, Overall Salmon, Newfoundland Lav, spawning grounds, cape random, lav salmon, lav lav, spawning ground, lav andrews, salmon swims, river born, salmon dreams, dreams fish, life purpose salmon, purpose salmon directly, salmon directly relates, salmon lav's dreams, caught meaning dreams,

Approximate Word count = 1337
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: English