Content Warning: This text discusses systemic racism, police violence, and the death of a Black man.

As evidenced by the title, the primary symbol in Open Water is water, particularly swimming in a body of water. Overall, water represents emotion and vulnerability, while oceans particularly represent the possibility of an expansive and open life—alongside the psychological dangers that such a life creates. The water can by turns cleanse, as when the “trauma of trauma [is] washed away by the waves” (38), and destroy, as when the woman ends her relationship with the narrator and he feels that any words “will be drowned by the sound of rushing water” (135). The latter suggests that the narrator is so overwhelmed by his feelings that he can’t speak.

Most often, the metaphor of swimming in water is tied to the narrator’s relationship with his lover. She dares to metaphorically swim in the titular open water, meaning that she is comfortable with the risk of being completely honest with another person. Initially, the symbol is introduced in reference to the two lovers when the woman’s poet friend “sees both the tremble in the water and the sinking stone which caused the ripple” (53), which summarizes the way the narrator and the woman have disturbed each other’s previously separate and calm emotional existences.