Waiting for Time

The Symbolism of Lav's fish dream 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

Johns but now there getting kind of weird, because now as the salmon swims its swimming through and past obstacles. 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. Anyway Lav Lived her life alarmingly the same as the salmon lived its life. 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). The salmon is Lav and Lav is the salmon, there one entity. The thing is when the salmon spawns she dies of accelerated old age which will be the opposite of Lav. The salmon in a sense was carrying this knowledge of finding her spawning ground and passing it onto Lav. Also know that Lav has found out about her past, she is now herself a carrier of knowledge of her ancestors and her immediate family. Eventually Lav grows up gets her PhD and gets a job in Newfoundland, you can see here Lav makes her way back to the river where she was born but she still hasn't reached her spawning grounds. Lavs Life began in a small town in Newfoundland which was called Cape Random it was from there that her mother left with her and took her to Ottawa to live. But in a sense she is dead because she's in the middle of nowhere and she no longer practices her career so you could almost take her life as being dead, she's trapped in Cape Random. 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 Cape Random. It's the very nature and the life purpose of a salmon that directly relates to and symbolizes Lav Andrews. Bernice Morgan uses the perfect fish to symbolize Lav Andrews.