Yellow Dog Symbol Analysis

In Orbiting Jupiter, the yellow dog represents 12-year-old Jack Hurd’s desire to rescue his 14-year-old foster brother, Joseph Brook, from Joseph’s traumatic past—and Jack’s ultimate inability to do so. One day, when Jack and Joseph are walking home from school, Joseph wanders out onto a frozen river by the road. Jack knows that the ice doesn’t freeze solid until later in winter, so he tries desperately to persuade Joseph to come back to the road. When Joseph falls through the ice, Jack vividly remembers a yellow dog he saw at age six: the dog had half-fallen through the river ice and was struggling to climb to safety. Six-year-old Jack wanted to run and help the dog, but his mother Mrs. Hurd held him back to keep him out of danger—and the dog drowned.

Jack’s flashback draws a connection between the helpless dog and the traumatized Joseph, who later tells Jack that he went onto the ice because his first love Madeleine, who died giving birth to their daughter Jupiter, adored skating. Later, the novel emphasizes the connection between Joseph and the yellow dog when Joseph and Jack’s vice principal, Mr. Canton, scolds Jack for defending Joseph in a locker-room fight by saying, “Trouble follows [Joseph] like a yellow dog.” Joseph dies at the novel’s climax when his drunk, abusive father, Mr. Brook, drives him onto a derelict bridge that collapses under their car—leading them to drown in the very river that killed the yellow dog and from which Jack rescued Joseph from earlier in the book. In hindsight, readers can see that Jack’s inability to save the yellow dog from drowning as a six-year-old foreshadows his powerlessness to save his beloved foster brother from his traumatic past or abusive adults years later.