When Bobby Western first appears in the novel, he is investigating an underwater plane crash. He is a salvage diver, which is a significant metaphor in the novel. Bobby struggles to maintain a balanced life and is often salvaging the “wreckage” of his personal life. He spends a great deal of time reliving the past, specifically the remorse he feels about his sister Alicia’s death by suicide. Much of what transpires in the novel’s present involves Bobby trying to come to grips with the traumas he’s experienced. As Bobby tries to make sense of his life and find a meaning in it, he is haunted by the idea that someone as intellectually gifted as Alicia could not make sense of life, and this fact lends substance to his overall aimlessness.

The son of a renowned physicist, Bobby is highly intelligent. While he does not possess the same acumen as his father did, or that Alicia did, he has a highly developed scientific mind. When Bobby was a young boy, he was able to label and categorize every living thing that existed in a pond habitat near his grandmother’s house. Bobby’s purpose as a young man is to make sense of the world through scientific inquiry.