“What would twelve years of living like veal do to their minds? Is there a point, Malorie wonders, where the clouds in the sky become unreal, and the only place they’ll ever feel at home is behind the black cloth of their blindfolds?”

Malorie wonders whether her attempts to protect her children could have unintended consequences. Specifically, she fears that their adoption of certain behaviors as necessities could prevent them from ever fully appreciating the world, if the time ever comes that they are given the opportunity to do so. Malorie’s competing desires to protect the children and to provide a meaningful life for them drive her behavior throughout the novel.

“You are saving their lives for a life not worth living.”

In a moment of self-doubt, Malorie wonders whether her protective parenting style defeats the purpose of raising children, which is to offer them happy and meaningful life. It is Malorie’s desire to see the children not only survive but also prosper that motivates her to leave the home where they lived safely for several years and embark on a dangerous journey down the river. To her, it is a risk worth taking.

“‘Whatever they are,’ Tom says, ‘our minds can’t understand them. They’re like infinity, it seems. Something too complex for us to comprehend. Do you see?’”

The mechanism by which the creatures affect people is never fully explained, but Tom offers a credible, if vague, explanation. Lacking motives, characterization, or descriptive details of any kind, the creatures take on symbolic significance as emblematic of unknowable, things.