Man in the Mirror

Man in the Mirror is a Michael Jackson song that punctuates Bee Branch’s arrival in Antarctica and recurs during the daily routine she observes aboard the cruise ship. First heard as she sleeps through the ship’s approach to land, it becomes both a literal summons to wake and a recurring measure of time in a voyage where ordinary day-and-night cues have disappeared.

First Appearance as a Wake-Up Call

After taking pills to make herself sleep through the voyage, Bee wakes briefly to a black sea and sky, sees a large piece of ice, and takes more pills. The song then begins faintly in her room and grows louder over several minutes: “I’m starting with the man in the mirror…” The music comes through the speakers while a bright slit of light shows beside the window shade. It interrupts the sleep she has chosen to prolong just before the ship’s public-address announcement welcomes passengers to Antarctica. Bee pulls up the shade and sees the rocky, snow-topped island, making the song’s gradual increase in volume part of her awakening to the place she has been trying not to face.

Recurrence in the Shipboard Routine

The song returns in Bee’s account of the days that follow. Because the sun never sets and she cannot tell the time, she measures the days by Elgin Branch’s habits: he sets his alarm for six in the morning, goes to the gym, and Bee hears Michael Jackson singing before he returns to shower. The music is now not a dramatic interruption but a dependable cue within a repeated sequence. Elgin’s morning routine gives Bee a way to orient herself even as she stays behind aboard the ship while passengers go ashore.

Narrative Function

The title’s mirror image is made concrete by the song’s place in a scene of waking: Bee has been sleeping to evade the voyage, and the music helps bring her attention back to the window and the Antarctic landscape beyond it. Its recurrence then shifts its function from sudden summons to daily marker. The song links one charged moment of arrival with the quieter repetitions of life aboard ship, where Bee’s sense of time depends less on the endless daylight than on the familiar sounds of her father’s routine.