Costabel is a village by the seashore, located on the boundary of all opposites. This borderline setting where water meets the sand is the demarcation of life and death, where evolution marks the change of sea creature to land animal. It is a place of turning points.


It is here in this place that Eisely says that every form of life is striving to return, to the great mother that has nourished and protected all life, where the protagonist first sees the largely symbolic act of throwing the stranded starfish back into the sea.

The archetypal image of "mother" plays a dual role in his mind. It is both a nourishing and protecting figure, as well as an ultimately rejecting one.

Costabel is a paradox, both real and imagined, a buzzword in the author's brain. Ideas are described as being like insects in his thoughts. They whirr and buzz, rise to the beam of light that he imagines radiates from his skull like a lighthouse beacon searching for some kind of truth in the dark night.

He pictures himself as the stripped empty skull with eyes orbiting around it. For him, there is more than one meaning, since the eyes are set in the orbital sockets. It is difficult to say how much of a double entendre he intends, since he is writing from a deeper need than a merely conscious perspective. He makes a revealing statement about himself later in the work. "I was the inhumanly stripped skeleton without voice, without hope, wandering alone on the shores of the world."

The shore of Costabel represents his entire universe, and Eisely becomes a star traveler within. The eye motif is repeated in varying forms throughout this journey, as the idea moves from the revolving eyes of his planetary skull to the torn eye of cosmic judgment to the "Reproachful Eye floating upon night and solitude".

As a child Eisely's mother kept an eye on him, but there is too much conflict in his memories of her. From his perspective she was a model of instability, and he uses many metaphors to try and explain his view of her to himself and to us. He feels that she was, in a sense, a Christ-like figure but not as a Savior, since she calls her presence on earth her long crucifixion of life .

This feeling has left him feeling less than secure, as if she had taught him to walk on the precipice of an iceberg rather than on the sure flat land of the prairie.

Even the image of the prairie, that dependable terrain, does not assuage his fears that things are well, for even there tormenting dust devils could arise out of nowhere to terrorize him.

When a child he dreamed of hiding in caves from the devils, in earth cellars he had dug to shelter himself. His efforts at self-preservation do not reassure him, for the Neanderthal cave man of his Id cannot run or hide from the djinn-like dust devils and demons that chase him on the nightmarish flatland of his interior landscape.

Grown to adulthood Eisely is a man of reason, a trained scientist, but he is haunted by the more primitive image of the trickster, a comic and yet sinister figure found in the fables of many aboriginal peoples.




This "coyote" figure in Eisely's scenario is a mocker, always mocking him behind his back. This is his nemesis personified, a masked and demonic figure.

His trickster is mute, never speaking. He is "nightmare" itself, painted fully in black, taking on all the characteristics and definitions of darkness that he harbors within himself, and there are many such images stored in his brain.

The trickster carries a little whip, flicking and punishing him, full of silent laughter and derision. This demon is a spirit that lives at his home, as it were, and certainly lives at the heart of his problems.

Eisely writes, "In the moment I witnessed that fireside performance, I knew with surety that primitive man had lived with a dark message." He describes this personal demon. His timed and stylized posturing conveyed derision.

After admitting this, he almost immediately describes himself as going out into the dark night as a troubled believer with the shadow of the trickster looming behind him and haunting him always. This demon is perennially near but has not spoken for twenty-five years. It is a mute stalker, and he wonders: Who or what is this trickster?

Eisely uses myths and fairy tales to help explain his inner abode. He talks about the witching hour, the twelfth hour, that magic hour when transformations often occur.

It is at this hour the coach turns back into a pumpkin and black magic works its ancient art. Instability lies at the heart of the world, he says. This perceived world of instability lies at the root of his perception of "mother". He further states about his actual mother, "She had been deaf. All her life she had walked the precipice of mental breakdown".

His mother's walk on the treacherous bluffs of glacier mountains becomes his burden.

The image of darkness occurs in other cases besides in the form of the trickster. That image often portrays the unknown, something to be feared. Darkness at the edge of the shore, at the edge of his mind, haunts him as no pale ghost could. He grapples with this idea and of his perceived primeval evolutionary past.

The mysteries of the pagan human psyche are shrouded in the wrappings of undiscovered darkness. His journey to meet the messenger begins in darkness and progresses as the light increases. He writes, "I arose and dressed in the dark". For him,the dark is a kind of psychological blindness. He needs to illuminate his landscape.

The meeting of a savior-like figure, something that his mother cannot be, proves to be the literary pivotal point, the shifting of Eisley's despair. He dresses in the darkness but senses a faint sense of coming "light somewhere behind me in the east". There is expectation and anticipation.

Morning enters slowly, and a vague figure appears to him in a rainbow light, the covenant symbol of a New World. He appears to be a human figure, although he is not conscious of his place in Eisley's scheme of things.

This image is a messianic one, a fisher of starfish and a fisher of men, a replacement figure for the rejecting mother.

This symbolic person takes the religious posture of kneeling in the ever-changing prism of light. The star thrower hurls a starfish back into the sea saying that it may live, raising the question of whether this is possibility or permission, for he had, at any rate, "the posture of a god".

With his first encounter with the savior-metaphor, a seed sown in his heart and in his consciousness that must filter down from his conscious mind to his heart for acceptance. It will take some time to germinate.

He walks away, not yet a true believer. He thinks that the man on the beach is only a man after all, one man in the midst of all the death washed ashore on the shipwreck-beach of Costabel.

In some ways Eisely's life is a shipwreck washed ashore on the beach of Costabel. He is trying to sort things out there: what to save, what to keep?

He returns to his mother's home after she has died and has literal and psychological sorting to do. His mother, like the sea, has been an overwhelming memory for him. He speaks of the sea in this way, "In the end the sea rejects its offspring".

His mother, mute for many years in death, the originator and sea of primordial life in his embryonic state, breaks the ties of her legacy to him just as the umbilical cord separates mother and child at birth, and the spectral mother speaks to him.

He finds Victorian photographs of her relatives with her eyes speaking to him. "The gaze was mutely clairvoyant and lonely". Her eyes are his eyes, actually and figuratively.

In this repressed Victorianism, in a small town in Iowa he finds that, "Here it all began, her pain and mine".

There is never any mention of a father. Only his mother figures into the barrenness of the photographs. Here, in the grainy silver reflections of reality, he discovers the source of his dark images and the source of his eye motif. The eyes in the photograph were already remote and shadowed.

This also is the source of the shadow which looms over him. He is his mother's son, and the words and images he uses tell much of the conflict and pain between the two. The agonized eye stays frozen in his mind's portrait even when Eisley closes his own.

Can there be a more haunting image? This conflict results in another portrait in his brain: the torn eye.

The Biblical injunctions, no doubt whispered to him by his mother's Victorian upbringing, exhort him to reject the world and its vulgarities, but he loves worldly things and all its weak creatures. Perhaps his mother thought he was weak and vulgar, mired down in the primal ooze; he might imagine that he is unable to rise to the level she had envisioned for him. His eye in his room in Costabel discovers yet another eye also present there, searching, penetrating, and looking through him as if he were a transparent jellyfish.

That eye is not one of a dead octopus, not the eye of an ever- watchful God, not the eye of the battered animal from childhood memory. He superimposes external reality and interior mirage and writes, "Finally, there was an eye that seemed torn from a photograph, but that looked through me ... I knew the eye and the circumstance and the question. It was my mother. She and the circumstance and the question. It was my mother. She was long dead, and the way backward was lost".