Infinite Summer

There are many references to the color blue and few reference to any other color. Any thoughts about this?

Here's a list of what I have noted:

The book jacket is blue
The medical staffer overseeing Kate Gompert is chewing blue gum - p. 69
Schtitt's blue eyes - p. 80
Tiny Ewell's roommate sits in a blue plastic chair - p 86
the Entertainment came from "out of the blue?" "From somewhere blue?" - p. 90
the entertainment called a blue dazzle - p. 90
blue crush carpet in the locker room - p. 99
blue steel of lockers - p. 99
Hal's blue eyes - p. 101
Orin's and the Mom's lighter blue eyes - p. 101
Hal's blue ankle - p. 104
Inactive viewer's screen is the color of way out over the Atlantic looking straight down on a cold day - p.115
ETA Comm Ad lobby with it's royal blue shag - p 151
dancer is wearing blue and white striped top - p. 229
Joelle looks at the blue river. -p 233
"You have a river outside you that is robin-egg's blue" - p 233
The Charles rolling away far below the windowless bathroom is vividly blue, more mildly blue on top from the fresh rainwater ...a deeper Magic Marker blue below the dilute layer - p237
smoke's baby-blanket blue - p 239
the light sharp bitter tint of a heated sky's blue that left her uprightly fetal with chin on knees - p 239
Molly had somebody lacquer the tub in blue - p 239
vomiting of the lip of the cool blue tub - p 240
vomiting muddy juice and blue smoke - p 240
bladed vessels aloft in the night to monitor flow, searchlit helicopters, fat fingers of blue light from one sky, searching. -p 240

Medical staffer chews blue gum (can't remember what page)

Kate Gompert is wearing dark-blue boating sneakers without socks on page 68.

_________________
"It is easy to put on a show & be cocky. . . Or I can show you some really fancy movement. But to express oneself honestly, not lying to oneself. . . now that, my friend, is very hard to do." --Bruce Lee

Endnote 30: the "beautiful" blue eyewash container.

People! The book is over nine-hundred pages long! That's enough for a colour to turn up a lot of times!

There is a section coming up where Hal catalogues the things he sees that are blue.

The prevalence of blue at ETA just seemed to me accounted-for because it's Tavis' favorite color, so I read the mention of all things blue at ETA as just an extension of his stifling and somewhat obnoxious presence.

If you want to be symbolic with the color itself, blue could signify masculinity and paternity, which Tavis is somewhat an expressed failure with regards to both. He's a man of many words that both signify nothing and earn no one's trust. He's also kind of the playing the "usurper role" to JOI in a lot of ways, but fails in the role kind of in the opposite ways that JOI failed.[*]



[*]

I also like Maranthe's stilted misunderstanding of the U.S. idiom meaning "by surprise" or "without warning" as something "coming from the blue place" or "from somewhere blue."

I've read the dominance of blue in IJ as an homage to David Lynch's Blue Velvet. That movie, highly stylistic and creepy and beautiful, uses a couple of symbols frequently: Blue, Insects, Darkness/Shadows, the Femme Fatale, damage to the brain- the IJ parallels are pretty clear. Now whether a deeper meaning exists for each of these/what that meaning is goes beyond my knowledge of David Lynch. So, I'm sorry, but I have no great speculations to offer as to the meaning of blue.