Approach of the Study Method of the Study
23 For the first hour Daniel laughed and smiled, shrugged his shoulders, and
was successful in swatting the bees off his face. But as the second hour droned on and the insects showed no sign of fatiguing, his vision began to
blur along with his judgment. Cunning and vicious, the bees uncovered every crack in his marriage, exposed every insecurity a husband might harbor
toward his wife p.135.
From the quotations above, it can be seen that the bees only appear when they invade to attack people. Since the bees always appear in the novel whenever
unpleasant events happened, it fits Kennedy and Gioia’s 2007 theory. It says that “if an object appears time and again, or is tied inextricably to the storys events, its
likely to suggest something beyond itself” p.230. The bees appear when Eva wants them to attack and bother certain people whom she finds irritating and disobeying.
Setiawan also gives clear evidence that the bees are attached to one certain soul,
Eva. This is shown by this sentence, “Eva gave him no reprieve, charging the insects to hunt him in every gorge and ravine of his book” p.63. They start and end their
violence actions according to Eva’s command. ‘Leave him, son’, ordered Eva from her seat. And with these three words, the bees suddenly cleared from the air” p.63.
The bees follow every order with their natural instinct to serve their queen. In the novel, the bees do not have any queen bee to obey but Eva.
Additionally, the idea that the bees are one of the symbols is supported by Stanton’s 1965 theory that a symbol evokes emotion. The bees play an important
role in every torture given by Eva. Setiawan assures that the bees appear in the every crucial time. He makes every bee’s appearances left an uncomfortable feeling to
everyone who interacts with them. Even Meridia can tell what happened only by seeing them. “Having witnessed the bees at work on Elias before, Meridia guessed
24 what had happened” p.136. The bees’ appearance marks that something bad will
happen to Meridia. Meridia even concludes indirectly that the bees make her fall in to a bad state of marriage, “For the first time in her marriage, Meridia felt liberated
from the bees. The anxiety, the tension, the petty arguments between her and Daniel disappeared” p.140. Thus, the bees, as explained by Meridia, create such a havoc
to her life. They create terror and evoke unpleasant atmospheres around Meridia. Arp and Johnson 2008 also say that something can be called as a symbol
when it has a meaning beyond its literal meaning. Based on this idea, the quotations above can tell that the bees in the novel are not the real bees which should be
interested in finding nectar, they give terror instead. Furthermore, as suggested by Barnet, Burto, and Cain 2011, an object is a symbol when it is told repeatedly.
The bees do repeatedly appear in the novel to satisfy their ruler, Eva, to attack people. Thus, referring to all the theories above, the bees are one of the symbols in
the novel.