One might say the value of Swamplandia! is that the novel attempts to reconcile innocence and experience. This is true at least at the level of plot structure, because there is a child who is naïve, but also morally competent and excited about life, and this story drags that little sweet child through the mud, like a child being left alone in a real swamp. One could say that being in a wet, humid, hot swamp with mud up to one's knees—it's a good metaphor for life, and in this story, it's also dark.
Why should darkness play such an important role in this story, both at the plot level and at the "meaning" level, or the analytical level. Well, for one thing, it is a natural metaphor for horror, because children often fear the dark. Although children might think their fear of the dark is cowardly, an adult would say, "No, that is not cowardly; it is accurate." Darkness plays a vital role in how the world is shaped, because at night, the streets become unsafe in most places, and many people harm others in the darkness, and predators lurked in the dark while we were evolving as a species.
So this is a novel about the unknown becoming revealed to a person. That is revelatory from a literary analysis point of view, so we might also say the novel is about a child's apocalypse. This novel is about the end of the childhood delusion in a kind of doom, because the darkness is not only scary to push us toward being brave (which it does) but also, the darkness is genuinely painful and threatening. The child learns through these experiences that to keep her original excitement for life, she will have to fight an uphill battle.
