Both Sarah and Little Bee lost flesh and blood on the beach; Sarah - her finger - and Little Bee - her sister. Although the blows occur in very different places with equally varying emotional damage, they are derived from the same blade. Symbolically, the characters posses an identical scar from which the flesh was sliced, their wounds mirror images of each other. Chris Cleaver writes a beautiful and poignant scene in which the two characters join together at the wound to form a whole.
"I held tight to her arm and I placed the palm of her left hand on the back of my left hand. I arranged my fingers underneath hers so that the only one of my fingers you could see was the one that was missing from Sarah's hand. I saw how it could be I saw how we could make a life again." (pg 148).
It carries the beauty of sympathy and empathy yet unveils the gravity of their fragility. Sarah is incapable of surviving in a quotidian sense, and Little Bee cannot survive at all. Combined, these characters have the abilities and the means to live full lives unburdened by the past. However, it is through each other that they make this possible because they have a common suffering. I wonder about the characters in Auster's Sunset Park and how they might have coped if they found others who were familiar with the prickly details of their horrors. Although Mile's parents suffered the same loss of Bobby, neither carried the burden witnessing the event. I suppose the wisdom to be distilled from these two novels is that distancing one's self from others, like Miles, does not equate to independence and maturity. It is recognizing when one is stuck and in need of assistance, and then actively seeks guidance that marks adulthood, like Little Bee.
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