Olivia Robertson CCQC's

Delaney and Kyra do not represent the vast and wildly differing opinions of the United States; if so, their characters would be very different from how they are; however, they do represent the opinions and characteristics of many of the most liberal, leftist, and ‘socially aware’ Americans. One of the things that sets them apart initially as a couple is Delaney’s stay-at-home-dad status, and Kyra’s mobility as a nuanced professional. “She was the chief breadwinner here, the one who went off to the office while he stayed at home. Which was all right by him,” (35). Their liberal viewpoints make him more comfortable doing things considered somewhat abnormal, and at a stretch mildly radical, by the opposite extreme of his society. He may be critical of other people, but he’s vulnerable to his own opinion being manipulated as long as he’s capable of maintaining a fraction of the liberal ideology; when talking to Jack in line at the supermarket, he says, “I don’t like the gate– I’ll never like it– but I accept it,” (104), conceding easily his own beliefs and, virtually, accepting as fact the racist statistics and beliefs of his neighbor. Kyra subscribes to almost all of the exact same beliefs as him, but his subjective fascination with nature and wildlife is, for her, replaced with shallow material obsession and a strong business drive. She feels an attachment to only one piece of property that she shows, and that desire to own fuels her working ambition– “Of all the places she’d ever shown, this was the one that really spoke to her [...] Way below it, like some sort of fungus attached to the flank of the mountain, lay the massed orange tile rooftops of Arroyo Blanco,” (77). Delaney’s passion is for nature, and Krya’s is for money and real-estate selling, and the both of them are in deep denial of their own repressed racism. 

The most blatant representation of Boyle’s use of irony in the book is the name of Delaney’s column, something he also had printed on his customized license plate: pilgrim. Delaney is a white American who has hardly moved across the country, much less moving and settling into a new country. “The whole thrust of the ‘Pilgrim’ columns was that he himself was a recent transplant, seeing the flora and fauna of the Pacific Coast with the eye of a neophyte,” (109). He chooses the name Pilgrim in homage to a writer, and he describes himself in his column as a pilgrim through the natural world, “I’m a pilgrim, that’s all, a seer, a worshiper at the shrine,” (76). However, the perspective of his neighbor, a perspective he’s pulled to slowly, sharply criticizes all immigrants to the country, with heavy emphasis on the illegal ones. “The ones coming in through the Tortilla Curtain down there, those are the ones that are killing us. They’re peasants, my friend,” (101). Delaney also lives, generally speaking, in the lap of luxury, in a soon to be literally gated community, eating fancy fish meals for dinner, his wife taking dozens of vitamin supplements in the morning with her fresh squeezed orange juice. Of course, Delaney does not mean Pilgrim in the sense of Immigrant, he intends it in a way similar to that of those on a pilgrimage searching for religious meaning, only to return home later. However, there are real pilgrims living in his country, just outside his door.