Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Beartown, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Community Breakdown and Inequality
Culture, Character, and Entitlement
Parents and Children
Loyalty and Belonging
Resistance and Courage
Summary
Analysis
Kira comes into the Bearskin to ask Ramona a question. She thanks her for convincing The Pack to vote in support of Peter, but she doesn’t understand why she did it. Ramona just tells her that people in Beartown know the difference between good and evil. Someone in the bar gets Kira a beer. Kira knows it’s a gesture showing that people are capable of “more than one thought […] at the same time. That you can want to punch a man in the face but still refuse to let anyone hurt his children.”
In the end, Beartown is a more complicated place than it sometimes appears on the surface. Though conflict brings out the worst in people, many people are also still capable of discerning between overlapping loyalties and making the right judgments in the end.
Themes
Outside, Robbie Holts passes the Bearskin without going inside—he has to go to work the next day.
Robbie Holts has succeeded in getting a job, presumably in Tails’s supermarket, and is turning his life around; perhaps the same can be true for other struggling men in the town.
Themes
David stops at Katia’s bar in hopes of finding Benji there. He’s decided he wants to pass down his own father’s heirloom watch to him. The bouncer points him toward the pond in the woods. When David approaches, he sees Benji and the bass player kissing and begins to shake. Driving home, he remembers how many anti-gay jokes his dad used to make, how “gay” was always a slur. Now he feels disgusted with himself. He’s helped raise Benji like his own son, but Benji apparently didn’t trust David with his biggest secret. He feels like a failure knowing that Benji must have thought David would be care about him less if he knew he were gay.
David’s fatherly love is clear for Benji especially because of his sense of failure; he recognizes that he hasn’t been fully trustworthy for Benji. It’s another moment in which David finally recognizes that what happens in hockey—like “harmless” banter—has repercussions elsewhere.
Themes
After tossing around ideas with her old hockey friend, Jeannette, Adri goes to Sune’s house and asks him how to set up a hockey team. Skeptical at first, Sune ends up walking through Beartown with Adri, stopping at home after home and asking each time whether any young girls live there. At one house, the door is answered by a four-year-old girl covered with bruises. Heartbroken, Adri asks the little girl if she wants to learn how to play hockey. The little girl nods.
The beginning of the girls’ hockey team is significant in a few ways—for one, it shows that Sune has something new to offer to the town even now. For another, it suggests that Beartown hockey really can be transformed for the better. Finally, the bruised little girl—reminiscent of a young Peter Andersson—will become the next Beartown hockey legend.
Themes
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David longs to drive back to Hed and embrace Benji, but he knows he can’t force him to tell him something he doesn’t want to share. Years from now, he’ll fulfill all his dreams of coaching success, but he’ll never let anyone else wear Benji’s #16. For now, he goes to the cemetery and leaves a puck on Alan Ovich’s grave, on which he’s written, “Still the bravest bastard I know.” He also leaves the heirloom watch.
David leaves another message for Benji, making it clear that Benji is the player who is most like a son to him.
Themes
