Where'd You Go, Bernadette

Part 6, unlike the previous parts of the novel, does not incorporate multiple documents or perspectives. Instead, Bee narrates the story of her trip with her father to Antarctica, interspersed with flashbacks describing her brief time at Choate and her return to Seattle. Bee relates how disconnected she already felt from her fellow Choate students when the manila envelope arrived containing the documents she is now assembling and expanding into a book. Bee is convinced that Bernadette is alive and that it was Bernadette who sent her the manila envelope. Bee—angered by Elgin’s betrayal of her mother, including his attempt to have her committed, his apparent refusal now to believe she is still alive, and his involvement with Soo-Lin—has made an “executive decision” about her father: “I hate him” (281).

Bee and Elgin travel to Antarctica together, a trip that Bee sees as a search for her mother and that Elgin sees as an attempt to find closure and reconcile with his daughter. Bee is annoyed by her father’s fussy habits and obsessively careful packing. She is also upset by the crews’ references to “the lady who killed herself,” now rumored to have been an escaped mental patient. 

On the voyage to Antarctica, between bouts of seasickness that keep her in bed for hours and make the passage of time uncertain, Bee attempts to investigate her mother’s disappearance.