The motif of imagination
Benna is an imagination machine. If she has a problem, she knows how to be creative and silly in just the perfect way to provide an emotional option for herself through her imagination. Perhaps for regret of her abortion, perhaps for other reasons, Benna participates in an imaginary motherhood. She raises and imaginary daughter.
The motif of word games and puns
To say that Benna is a person who makes jokes about language is to say that Benna experiments with meaning, even offering herself imaginary meaning. This affects her language in the form of games and thought experiments, and she often amuses herself with her clever associations.
The symbolic child
To say that Benna's child is imaginary is a statement of her own life's meaning. She is basically accepting the reality that motherhood constitutes part of a woman's life on the earth, and that by rejecting motherhood by aborting the baby, she wonders what it would have been like. So she invents and imaginary child, and she is a wonderful mother to the imagination. This symbolizes the weird relationship Benna has to hope. Does she believe life is meaningful and funny, or does she believe in the suicidal loneliness of her existence? The imaginary child represents that although she believes it might be real for other people, life's meaning is essentially fake for her.
Darrel as an allegory
A Vietnam veteran knows more about the world than an everyday citizen. Not to mention that Darrel is also a black man. Interestingly Benna's relationship to race is changed by Darrel. Therefore, Darrel represents the allegory of people being faced with unpleasant, unignorable facts about other people's suffering. In Benna's imaginary game of pretending life is better than it is, Darrel represents the limitations of those games, namely that they don't change reality for people who have really suffered. Darrel represents the unignorable truth.
Gerard as the missing father figure
When Gerald dies, he and Benna decided not to participate in child rearing. So Gerard's death is the death of the missing father figure in Benna's life. Benna realizes that subtly, she's always hoped that a man might save her from the meaninglessness of life, but now she believes it will never happen, and her loneliness becomes overwhelming and potentially dangerous. She starts making suicidal jokes in the privacy of her own mind. The reader gets the impression that she laughs because she absolutely has to laugh, or else she'll weep and scream.
