Genre
Coming of Age, Magical Realism, Adventure, Southern Gothic
Setting and Context
Present time in the Florida Everglades in a fictional swamp community
Narrator and Point of View
Mostly told from first-person narration by Ava Bigtree, then in third person narration through Kiwi Bigtree.
Tone and Mood
Shuttles between the surreal and fantastic when described by Ava and the depressingly mundane through Kiwi’s narration
Protagonist and Antagonist
Ava and Kiwi share the seat as the novel’s protagonists as they try on their own to keep their family intact and to preserve their way of life. The Birdman and The World of Darkness function as the novel’s antagonists as the former takes advantage of Ava’s innocence to violate her and the World of Darkness permanently destroys the Bigtree Clan’s way of life and livelihood.
Major Conflict
Three major blows come to the family: the Bigtree clan’s leader is committed to nursing home for dementia, his daughter-in-law and star attraction of Swamplandia dies of cancer, and a bigger, better amusement park opens up on the Florida mainland.
Climax
When the surviving members of the Bigtree family are reunited and the Bigtree children integrate into mainstream Florida society.
Foreshadowing
There is a lot of foreshadowing in the novel done through the symbolic recurring motifs. The appearance of moths are a foreshadowing of trouble for the Bigtree family and the discovery of “The Spiritist’s Telegraph” foreshadows Ava’s unravelling sanity and/or obsession with the occult.
Understatement
When the Bird Man offers to help Ava find her sister by making false claims of shamanic powers. This also foreshadows his evil intentions towards her.
Allusions
The World of Darkness rides are named after Biblical references such as The Leviathan, Lost Souls, the Lake of Fire, and The Four Pilots of the Apocalypse. There are also allusions to Greek mythology, specifically Orpheus’ descent into the Underworld, in Ava’s following of the Bird Man to search for Ossie.
Imagery
The novel is full of quirky, visceral descriptions of swamp flora and fauna as well as descriptions of grotesquely excessive campiness of the World of Darkness. These are alternated with macabre and grim images of the harsh realities the Bigtree family must face.
Paradox
The attempts of the surviving Bigtree members to salvage their park is tragic in its strangeness: rather than pulling the family together as the new leader The Chief abandons his children to work at a casino, Kiwi seeks minimum wage employment at the rival park, Ossie turns to the occult, and Ava has to undergo a harrowing rape in order to finally bring the family together.
Parallelism
Swamplandia is a parallel of the Bigtree Family’s condition. The park becomes progressively more run down as the Bigtree Family continues to deteriorate and become more estranged from one another.
Metonymy and Synecdoche
The Bigtree family makes use of metonymy as they have made up strange terminologies for things they encounter on a daily basis forming an eccentric code language only family members know. For example they name all their alligators “Seth” and the children take to calling the reptiles as “Seth” rather than alligators or ‘gators, e.g. “A tiny, fiery Seth.”
Personification
N/A
