Tress of the Emerald Sea

“The cups they brought her were often battered and worn, but Tress didn’t mind. A cup with a chip or ding in it had a story. She loved them all because they brought the world to her. Whenever she sipped from one of the cups, she imagined she could taste far-off foods and drinks, and perhaps understand a little of the people who had crafted them.”

This is one of the earliest moments revealing Tress’s hidden (even to her) desire to see the world. She believes she is content, but she is fascinated by cups and stories from around the world. Her story-based adventures through the cups foreshadow her real adventures.

“The thing growing between them felt so good, so wonderful, that Tress was frightened to call it love. From the way the other youths talked, ‘love’ was dangerous. Their love seemed to be about jealousy and insecurity. It was about passionate shouting matches and more passionate reconciliations. It was less like a good pair of gloves, and more like a hot coal that would burn your hands.”

Even Tress’s love reveals how different she is from others. Tress is in love, but she is not experiencing dangerous infatuation; she is experiencing the comfort and safety of real love.

“It was delivered by Hoid the cabin boy. (Yes, that’s me. What tipped you off? Was it perhaps the name?)”

This is the moment where Hoid finally identifies himself as narrator, although his voice has been dominant from the beginning. His voice acts as a framing device, tinging the entire story with his humor and observations.

“Charlie had at last been able to become part of a story. With effort, Tress was happy for him.”

Tress reveals how much she cares for others. She loves Charlie so much that she is willing to accept anything that makes him happy, even if it hurts her. Before she realizes that Charlie has been captured and cursed, she is excited that he has been able to live out a story similar to the ones he used to tell her.

“‘Well, why would you say the island is too small or me, Father? There’s nothing extraordinary about me. If anything, I am too small for it.’ ‘Everything is extraordinary about you, Tress,’ her mother said. ‘That’s why nothing in particular stands out.’”

This moment reveals Tress’s lack of self-awareness and confidence. Her view of herself is part of her inner journey throughout the narrative, and her mother and father’s opinions of her foreshadow what Tress will discover for herself.

“Isn’t one person’s pain enough? Why must a person like Tress feel for two, or more? Yet I’ve found that the people who are the happiest are the ones who learn best how to feel. It takes practice, you know. Effort. And those who (late in life) have been feeling for two, three, or a thousand different people…well, turns out they’ve had a leg up on everyone else all along.”

This is one of Hoid’s observations about humans and human nature. The narrative is threaded through with such observations, allowing Hoid to reveal ruminations that an author would otherwise have to make subtly through the story.

“Danger doesn’t make a thing less beautiful—in fact, there’s a magnifying influence. Like how a candle seems brightest on the darkest night. Deadly beauty is the starkest variety. And you will never find a murderess more intoxicating, more entrancing, than the sea.”

Another of Hoid’s observations, this piece of narration explores the concept of danger. This becomes an important theme for Tress’s journey as she confronts her fears.

“It was a freedom she had never before known, and had never before realized she needed. One of the great tragedies of life is knowing how many people in the world are made to soar, paint, sing, or steer—except they never get the chance to find out.”

This is one of the moments that introduces Tress to new opportunities for life. Tress thought she was content with life on the Rock, but when she is on the sea, she experiences freedom in a way she never has before. Tress’s journey to self-discovery truly begins.

“Whenever one does discover a moment of joy, beauty enters the world. Human beings, we can’t create energy; we can only harness it. We can’t create matter; we can only shape. It. We can’t even create life. We can only nurture it. But we can create light. This is one of the ways. The effervescence of purpose discovered.”

Hoid makes his own observations here, like he often does. Although Hoid usually comes across as flippant in his other Cosmere appearances, his experiences with Tress pull from him some of his great wisdom from observing humans in many worlds.

“She felt like a traitor. Staying and helping people she barely knew? Instead of hunting for a way to save him? She whispered prayers to the moons as she arranged the cups, and promised herself that she would find a way. If she could help this crew, and they weren’t willing to take her to the Midnight Sea in return, maybe they could still help her in some other way?”

Tress faces her inner moral dilemma here. She does not want to put the crew in danger, but she knows she needs help—or at least transport—to save Charlie. She weighs her options and struggles to decide what is “right.”

“She wasn’t even certain she was Tress anymore, or if she’d become someone else. You could say, in other words, that her state at the moment was distress.”

This is one of the moments revealing Tress’s struggle to accept her growth and change. She believes that by becoming someone new, she is somehow abandoning the previous version of herself, and this distresses her.

“As if that were a simple question to answer. People generally don’t know what they want, though they almost uniformly hate being told what it should be. Plus, Tress had lived her entire life feeling she shouldn’t ask for the things she wanted.”

Hoid’s observations reveal that by spending her life believing she should not ask for what she wants, Tress has put herself in the position of not truly knowing what she wants. Suppression has led to a lack of self-awareness.

“Tress wanted to answer. Because…she had noticed this. She wasn’t so timid about right and wrong, or about propriety, as she once had been. Was…something breaking inside her because of this life? Could she ever fix it?”

Here again, Tress contemplates whether the changes in her are “wrong.” Her inner journey is a challenge for her as she simultaneously accepts the changes by using her new skills and rejects them by believing she is no longer “herself.”

“It was all suddenly too much. People are like stomachs, you know. They can process some of what you feed them, but stuff in too much too fast, and eventually it’s going to come right back up.”

Hoid’s observations allow for more direct exploration of the human psyche. With Hoid as an intrusive narrator, Sanderson creates a character who can engage in a sort of dialogue with the reader rather than having the reader read between the lines to decipher Tress’s inner struggle.

“So were there many answers? Or were they all the same answer with different applications?”

Tress recalls the varying “answers” for what the meaning of life is that she has heard from priests. Confused over their differences and the quite different ways her crew members find satisfaction in life, Tress begins to philosophize and wonder about the meaning of life.

“Unfortunately, sympathy is not a valve, to be turned off when it starts to flood the yard. Indeed, the path to a life without empathy is a long and painful one, full of bartered humanity sold at a steep discount.”

Sometimes, Hoid’s observations become miniature sermons on human nature. After knowing so many people in so many worlds, Hoid finally speaks up about things like how to be a good person.

“I love memories. They are our ballads, our personal foundation myths. But I must acknowledge that memory can be cruel if left unchallenged. Memory is often our only connection to who we used to be. Memories are fossils, the bones left by dead versions of ourselves. More potently, our minds are a hungry audience, craving only the peaks and valleys of experience. The bland erodes, leaving behind the distinctive bits to be remembered again and again.”

Hoid reminisces about memories and the role they plays in human experience. Again, Hoid has seen the effect of humans’ emotional tendencies, and offers warnings through his telling of Tress’s story.

“[H]er hair, which she left unbraided more often these days—in a tail or just unrestrained, waving free. She paid for that with the brush at nights, but it felt…liberating. At home, she’d always been embarrassed for how her hair behaved. But out here, there were so many more pressing things to worry about.”

Although Tress still inwardly struggles with the ways she is changing, parts of her are enjoying the changes. Preoccupied with her endeavors, Tress realizes that her hair (and her management of it) no longer take precedence; she is no longer worried with embarrassment, which allows her to build more confidence.

“But lies have a way of diluting a person. The longer you live them, the more you become a bucket of mixed paint, steadily veering toward generic brown. That has never stopped me, mind you, but I’m not the person Tress was.”

This is one moment where Hoid sermonizes, but his observation reveals that he is quite different from the humans he interacts with. He openly admits to things like lying, despite his observation of how it “dilutes” a person.

“She hadn’t run out of ideas. She was simply tired. We want to imagine that people are consistent, steady, stable. We define who they are, create descriptions to lock them on a page, divide them up by their likes, talents, beliefs. Then we pretend some—perhaps most—are better than we are, because they stick to their definitions, while we never quite fit ours.”

Hoid again observes topics of mental health. Exhausted by everything she has done and by taking on so much responsibility and danger suddenly, Tress struggles to come up with new ideas to complete her quest. She believes something is wrong with her, as many who experience burnout, depression, or anxiety believe. Hoid, though, knows better.

“Instead of being angry at her for not having the solution, they had worked out one themselves. She…didn’t need to do this all on her own. That shouldn’t have been such a revelation for her. But after spending ages walking around with everyone piling bricks in your arms, it can throw you off balance when someone removes a brick to carry for you.”

This is a moment of transformation for Tress. She still struggles to accept help after this, but seeing how much her friends want to help her reveals to her the fact that it is alright to accept help and that people do, in fact, want to help.

“She’d been kind to him. This was the most difficult idea he’d ever been forced to swallow […] He thought the way he acted was normal, because that was how he’d always been treated.”

Laggart the cannonmaster does not play a major role, and is primarily important for his role as lackey to Captain Crow. When Tress is kind to him, however, he struggles to understand and accept it. Hoid’s observations provide the reader with a compassionate view of Laggart, who was raised with unkindness and thus thought it was normal.

“Human beings are like the shorelines of continents. The closer you look, the more detail you see, basically into infinity. If I didn’t practice narrative triage, you’d be here all week listening to how a Doug once got so drunk, she ended up as queen.”

As usual, Hoid provides tempting clues about stories that sound odd and exciting (such as the Doug who became a queen), but he does not follow through. This moment also provides a blunt explanation of how authors must compose their work, considering what is actually important for the story. Like Sanderson, Hoid knows much more about the Cosmere than the reader does, but he makes narrative choices to shape what his listeners or readers know. The framing device comes alive and breaks the fourth wall, highlighting its own presence.