Previous
Summary
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Anil’s Ghost, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Justice, Power, and Truth
Violence, War, and Greed
History and Memory
Work and Meaning
Westernization and Identity
Summary
Analysis
In an italicized scene, Anil works as a member of a forensic anthropology team exhuming and identifying bodies of people killed in the Civil War in Guatemala. Often, people will wait by the graves, fearing what the forensic anthropologists will find. If the bodies don’t belong to their family members, then the people waiting will travel to other mass graves in the Western Highlands, where similar exhumations are taking place. At one point, Anil walks back to a grave and sees a woman kneeling beside a grave. Her brother and husband were kidnapped and disappeared a year ago. Anil cannot find words to describe, even to herself, the look on that woman’s face.
The preface introduces the novel’s use of italicized sections as a formal device—something that recurs throughout the novel. These sections are often brief and interrupt the story’s main narrative. In this case, the italicized section describes Anil’s role as a forensic anthropologist working to identify people whom the Guatemalan government disappeared during the country’s civil war, which lasted from 1960 to 1996. This section serves as a preface to the novel, indicating that the novel as a whole may cover similar themes as this section, including the identification of missing people and the role that truth plays when grappling with state-sponsored terrorism.
Themes
