Canary

The canary appears only once in the novel, in a story James Hobart tells Theodore Decker about his own childhood. Hobie's canary was blind in one eye and had been rescued from a Woolworth's store. It woke him every morning of his boyhood by singing. The anecdote surfaces during a conversation in Hobie's workshop, where he is teaching Theo about wood and restoration, and it serves as a quiet counterpoint to the grand, tragic histories of the antique furniture around them. The canary, like the goldfinch in Fabritius's painting, is a small, captive creature, but its song is a daily, reliable joy. Hobie's rescue of the bird from a commercial setting mirrors his own life's work: salvaging beautiful, damaged things and giving them a second life. The canary's blindness and its song together suggest a kind of grace that persists despite—or even because of—imperfection. The bird is never mentioned again, but its image lingers as a symbol of the modest, personal beauties that can sustain a person through a difficult childhood, much as the painting of the goldfinch will later sustain Theo.