Fish Symbol Analysis

Fish—and the fish eggs and embryos Claire works with at the Hatchery—represent the community’s cruel detachment from its citizens and its total control over them. One of Claire’s jobs is to carefully inspect trays of fish eggs and to discard any that have died so they won’t contaminate the other eggs and embryos. This mirrors how, in the community, any people who don’t conform—such as Gabe and Claire—are effectively discarded when they’re unable to perform their proper functions in the community. Claire ends up in the Hatchery in the first place because she failed as a Birthmother. Gabe was ultimately born via C-section after a difficult labor, which Claire learns later was due to some anomaly with her. She’s thus swiftly moved away from the Birthmothers’ Dormitory. Similarly, Gabe experiences “failure to thrive”—by which the nurturers mean he can’t sleep through the night and is generally fussy—which is why the Committee of Elders plans to “release” (kill) him so he stops disrupting the other babies.

The Committee of Elders’s choices about Claire and Gabe, and the detached way that life functions in the community, is replicated in the Hatchery. Just as Hatchery workers are supposed to unemotionally discard eggs that aren’t perfectly healthy, the community sees no issue with discarding those people it sees as inappropriate and disruptive. This system also totally disregards Claire’s maternal love for her son, an emotion the novel suggests throughout the rest of the story are simply part of the human experience. Denying Claire and other Birthmothers a relationship with their babies turns the community’s project into one of simple survival. The goal, in other words, is to keep ensuring there will always be more people to populate the community and perform essential tasks, just as Claire’s job at the Hatchery is to make sure there will always be more fish to feed them. Finding fulfillment or happiness, however, doesn’t factor into this detached, soulless goal.