Zeitoun

Zeitoun

by

Dave Eggers

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Themes and Colors
Family, Community, and Home Theme Icon
Crime, Justice, and Injustice Theme Icon
Faith, Perseverance, and Dignity Theme Icon
Human vs. Natural Tragedy Theme Icon
Islam and Islamophobia Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Zeitoun, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Crime, Justice, and Injustice Theme Icon

With Zeitoun stranded in New Orleans and Kathy in Arizona with their children, two narratives on the fallout from Hurricane Katrina unfold. One, which Kathy hears largely from the media, is that Katrina has turned the city into a war zone, with stealing, shooting, and other illegal activity quickly becoming the norm. This sense of emergency creates a disconnect with her husband’s experience, at least initially: while he sees sporadic examples of looting, the days after the storm are much more defined by a vulnerable, desperate population seeking help or escape. Again and again, Zeitoun asks for help from among the police force, which has been highly militarized and is patrolling neighborhoods in military-style combat gear. He is almost always rebuffed, as it seems that they are there not to find people in need of assistance, but instead to “keep order” against only the vaguest of threats.

In fact, the entire legal and justice system seems to break down after Katrina, as Zeitoun is taken from prison to prison, refused a phone call, and held without bail and without being charged for a crime. A makeshift jail—Camp Greyhound—is quickly built and filled with supplies for the guards and employees, while a few miles away, the Superdome, which is packed with New Orleans residents, has nowhere near the same level of resources.

According to Eggers, the authorities’ post-Katrina emphasis on combating crime and lawlessness served not to uphold justice, but in fact to create injustice—a position that, the book argues, has much to do with the race and ethnicity of those who most needed help.

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Crime, Justice, and Injustice ThemeTracker

The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Crime, Justice, and Injustice appears in each chapter of Zeitoun. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Crime, Justice, and Injustice Quotes in Zeitoun

Below you will find the important quotes in Zeitoun related to the theme of Crime, Justice, and Injustice.
Part 4: Tuesday September 6 Quotes

When Zeitoun and the others entered the main room of the station, immediately fifty pairs of eyes, those of soldiers and police officers and military personnel, were upon them. There were no other civilians inside. It was as if the entire operation, this bus station-turned-military base, had been arranged for them.

Related Characters: Abdulrahman Zeitoun, Nasser Dayoob, Todd Gambino, Ronnie
Related Symbols: Camp Greyhound
Page Number: 210-211
Explanation and Analysis:

Until this point, Zeitoun had not been charged with a crime. He had not been read his rights. He did not know why he was being held. Now he was in a small white room being asked by two soldiers, each of them in full camouflage and holding automatic rifles, to remove his clothes.

Related Characters: Abdulrahman Zeitoun
Page Number: 216
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 4: Wednesday September 7 Quotes

Who did this work? Were there contractors and laborers working around the clock on a prison days after the hurricane? It was mind-boggling. It was all the more remarkable given that while the construction was taking place, on September 2, 3, and 4, thousands of residents were being plucked from rooftops, were being discovered alive and dead in attics.

Related Characters: Abdulrahman Zeitoun
Related Symbols: Camp Greyhound
Page Number: 227
Explanation and Analysis:

The ban on phone calls was, then, purely punitive, just as the pepper-spraying of the child-man had been born of a combination of opportunity, cruelty, ambivalence, and sport. There was no utility in that, just as there was no utility in barring all prisoners from contacting the outside world.

Related Characters: Abdulrahman Zeitoun
Related Symbols: Camp Greyhound
Page Number: 236
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 4: Saturday September 17 Quotes

He had long believed that the police acted in the best interests of the citizens they served. That the military was accountable, reasonable, and was kept in check by concentric circles of regulations, laws, common sense, common decency. But now those hopes could be put to rest.

Related Characters: Abdulrahman Zeitoun
Page Number: 263
Explanation and Analysis:

He thought of bycatch. It was a fishing term. They’d used it when he was a boy, fishing for sardines by the light of the moon they’d made. When they pulled in the net, there were thousands of sardines, of course, but there were other creatures too, life they had not intended to catch and for which they had no use. Often they would not know until too late.

Related Characters: Abdulrahman Zeitoun
Page Number: 263
Explanation and Analysis:

He had risked too much in the hopes that he might do something to match the deeds of his brother Mohammed. No, it had never been a conscious part of his motivation—he had done what he could in the drowned city because he was there, it needed to be done, and he could do it. But somewhere in his gut, was there not some hope that he, too, could bring pride to the family, as Mohammed had so many years ago? […] And was this imprisonment God’s way of curbing his pride, tempering his vainglorious dreams?

Related Characters: Abdulrahman Zeitoun, Mohammed Zeitoun
Page Number: 264
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 4: Tuesday September 27 Quotes

Kathy fell apart. She wailed and screamed. Somehow this, knowing that her husband was so close but that these layers of bureaucracy and incompetence were keeping her from him—it was too much. She cried out of frustration and rage. She felt like she was watching a baby drown, unable to do anything to save it.

Related Characters: Kathy Zeitoun
Page Number: 280
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 4: Thursday September 29 Quotes

They held each other for a long moment. She could feel his shoulder blades, his ribs. His neck seemed so thin and fragile, his arms skeletal. She pulled back, and his eyes were the same—green, long-lashed, touched with honey—but they were tired, defeated. She had never seen this in him. He had been broken.

Related Characters: Abdulrahman Zeitoun, Kathy Zeitoun
Page Number: 289
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 5: Fall 2008 Quotes

Gonzalez talked about how the system is supposed to work: police officers investigate, make arrests, and then hand the process over to the judicial system. Under normal circumstances, if the men were innocent, he maintained, they would have been given a phone call and the opportunity to post bail. “They should have gotten a phone call,” he said.

Related Characters: Ralph Gonzalez (speaker), Abdulrahman Zeitoun, Kathy Zeitoun
Page Number: 304
Explanation and Analysis:

On the one hand, knowing that these two police officers had not purposely hunted and arrested a man because he was Middle Eastern gave them some comfort. But knowing that Zeitoun’s ordeal was caused instead by systemic ignorance and malfunction—and perhaps long-festering paranoia on the part of the National Guard and whatever other agencies were involved—was unsettling. It said, quite clearly, that this wasn’t a case of a bad apple or two in the barrel. The barrel itself was rotten.

Related Characters: Abdulrahman Zeitoun, Kathy Zeitoun, Donald Lima, Ralph Gonzalez
Page Number: 307
Explanation and Analysis:

To dial a number given to you by a man in a cage, to tell the voice on the other end, “I saw him.” Is that complicated? Is that an act of great heroism in the United States of America? It should not be so.

Related Characters: Abdulrahman Zeitoun, Kathy Zeitoun, Missionary
Page Number: 319
Explanation and Analysis: