“Sunshine, been keeping me up for days”: The Importance of Music in Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch

Donna Tartt’s 2013 Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece The Goldfinch uses music as a part of the narrative - she presents us with details of what certain characters are listening to: be it hearing songs in the background of parties, humming as they get ready, or playing music out loud in a park while taking acid. She employs these songs as a literary technique that, when explored further, contributes significantly to our understanding of the character’s emotions. 

Tartt’s references to specific songs and lyrics situate Theo’s grief and provide us with a closeness to the character - it feels imperative to go away and listen to the songs Theo listens to, to connect with his emotions as our own. The first song explicitly mentioned is found shortly after Theo moves in with the Barbours; he hears it in the background of a party: ‘The pianist’s sparkling, up-tempo arrangement of  “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” seemed to be floating in from an alternative universe’ (Tartt 98). Freshly grieving his mother after she was killed in a terrorist attack, Theo reflects shortly after: ‘Over and over, I kept thinking I’ve got to go home and then, for the millionth time, I can’t’. Bob Dylan’s 1965 folk-rock hit seems appropriately chosen for this moment, and though Theo identifies it from a piano arrangement, the lyrics of the song hold weight here: 

You must leave now, take what you need, you think will last

But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast

Yonder stands your orphan with his gun

Crying like a fire in the sun

Look out the saints are comin’ through

And it’s all over now, Baby Blue.

The lyrics to this initial verse are overwhelmingly bleak, much like Theo’s new situation; he has been forced to leave and take what he needs, what he thinks will last, to navigate an entirely new world in which everything is marked by the absence of his mother. It is the painting of The Goldfinch - accidentally stolen from the gallery where the terror incident happened - that Theo finds himself grabbing, needing. Theo’s life becomes marked by the “before” and “after” of his mother’s death, and the painting holds weight as a material object that transverses these two categories and survives unbelievable turmoil. The connection Theo has to the painting is rooted in the hope that it will last - in the final paragraph of the novel, Tartt concludes: ‘For if disaster and oblivion have followed this painting down through time- so too has love. Insofar as it is immortal (and it is) I have a small, bright, immutable part in that immortality.’ (Tartt 864) Theo’s story begins bleakly; it all seems over from the start, but Tartt leaves us with a message of hope, the idea of starting over, just as Dylan writes in the final verse of Baby Blue: ‘Strike another match, go start anew / And it’s all over now, Baby Blue.’

Later in the novel, adult Theo finds himself listening (rather appropriately) to Elliott Smith: ‘but I’d been loopy and careless from the morphine tabs, drifting around my bedroom and humming to Elliott Smith as I dressed, sunshine… been keeping me up for days…’ (Tartt 637)  Presented with a version of Theo heavily dependent on various drugs (here he mentions ‘morphine tabs’) Smith’s final single released in his lifetime, “Pretty (Ugly Before)”, is a deeply accurate testament to Theo’s headspace. The song takes the listener through the emotions of a drug-induced trip - a sense of timelessness is introduced by its first lyrics, the lyrics that loop in Theo’s brain: ‘Sunshine, been keeping me up for days/ There is no nighttime / It’s only a passing phase.’ Through his grief and how he has chosen to cope, Theo’s life is repetitive, all the days blur into one; these lines are aptly repeated in the song just as Theo finds himself trapped in a monotonous cycle of grief. Smith refers likely to stimulants in the allegorical ‘sunshine’ that keeps him up - it allows him to feel better, for a while at least - ‘And I’ll feel pretty / Another hour or two’. The song prolongs and emphasises the emotions associated with addiction that Theo appears consumed by at this stage of the novel:

Sometimes, is all I feel up to now

But it’s not worth it to you

‘Cause you gotta get high somehow

Is it destruction that you require to feel? 

This self-destructive cycle is one Theo cannot yet escape as this song comes to mind while he speaks with Mrs Barbour about the death of her son, Theo’s childhood friend Andy. The grief that Theo feels, furthered by being sat in front of the maternal figure of Mrs Barbour, a woman who took him in after his own mother’s death, is dulled only by the opiates and, perhaps, the music. At the end of the novel, Theo tells his “non-existent reader” directly: “Whatever teaches us to talk to ourselves is important: whatever teaches us to sing ourselves out of despair.” (Tartt 864) Theo finds his comfort in art; obviously, the painting of The Goldfinch is the key aspect to it, but Theo’s love for music (including many songs omitted here; young Theo Decker can be found listening to Radiohead and The Beatles) prevails throughout the novel too. Faced with the permanency and trauma of death at a young age, Theo calls to the immortal, that which will outlive him, to “wade through the cesspool” that is life. 

Works cited: 

Dylan, Bob. “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” Spotify. https://open.spotify.com/track/4EgKcG7aswxVfQEqa3dl8S?si=69d8c2d5ce974ed7

Smith, Elliott. “Pretty (Ugly Before).” Spotify. https://open.spotify.com/track/1vQu2XkLm2mgw48oE84OjH?si=c6cd4a78f94340a7

Tartt, Donna. The Goldfinch. London, Abacus, 2014.

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