Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Deadly, Unna?, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Race, Injustice, and Action
Courage and Masculinity
Duty and Sacrifice
Teamwork and Family
Summary
Analysis
Blacky wakes up late in the morning the next day. Team-man is still asleep. Greggy is on the bedroom floor playing with a toy. He tells Blacky their father has gone out. Greggy asks Blacky about the funeral he went to. Blacky tells him not to ask so many questions. After Blacky showers, Greggy tells Blacky that their father is very angry, and Blacky replies that their father is crazy. Greggy gets mad at him for saying this and leaves. Blacky doesn’t blame him for idolizing their father, because Greggy is still young.
Greggy’s blind adoration of their father shows his youthful ignorance and how easy it is to idolize male role models. By contrast, Blacky’s complete dismissal of his father shows Blacky’s progress and maturity as a character. It’s clear from this moment that acting independently to attend Dumby’s funeral has made Blacky much stronger than trying to conform to expectations ever did.
Themes
In the kitchen, Blacky finds his mother, smoking and looking tired. She warns him not to bother his father. Blacky knows that if he stays away from the house, his father won’t come looking for him. His father always handles his anger by stewing on it until he explodes. His mom says she may have to leave town today because her own father is sick.
Blacky’s mother’s tiredness, after his father’s ruckus the night before, suggests that the old man’s violent temper weighs upon her just as it does Blacky and his siblings. Still, she does what she can to protect Blacky from the old man, showing her care for him.
Themes
Blacky hears his father pulling into the driveway and quickly climbs out through his bedroom window. He decides he’ll go to Pickles’s house, since his father and Pickles’ father don’t get along.
Despite his growth, Blacky still avoids confrontation with his father, even though he believes he made the moral choice by going to the funeral instead of going fishing.
Themes
Pickles’s house is poorly constructed and filled with old fishing junk. Blacky goes in and wakes Pickles up. Next to Pickles’s bed are jars of dead flies. Blacky knows Pickles blames him for his failed maggot business, because Blacky is friends with Darcy. Pickles says Cathy was looking for Blacky yesterday and left him a note breaking up with him.
Pickles’s house represents a typical house in a rural Australian fishing town, poor and crowded with junk. Cathy’s breakup with Blacky is part of the sacrifice Blacky willingly made in order to fulfill his duty to his friend, and this moment underscores just how much Blacky gave up in order to do the right thing.
Themes
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Pickles is leaving for the day but allows Blacky to stay in his room after Blacky tells him about his father’s anger. Blacky waits in Pickles’s room for a half hour but decides it’s too disgusting, so he leaves for the library. Before he goes, he tries to free Pickles’s one last living fly, but the fly is already dead.
Blacky’s attempt to release the fly, only to discover that it’s dead, aligns with his previous pessimistic attitude, that even if he tried to do something for his team or his community, he wouldn’t succeed. However, Blacky does not let this failure slow him down now, since he realizes that it’s up to him to do what is right no matter what.
Themes
At the library, Blacky meets the librarian, Mrs. Ashburner, who is also the town Sunday School teacher. She greets him by calling him his brother’s name and then tells him that all the Black siblings look alike. Blacky agrees. He looks for the romance novel his mother was reading earlier that year because he never got a chance to finish it. He can’t find the book and feels sad that he’ll never know what happens to the characters.
Blacky’s sadness over not knowing what happens to the character echoes the loss of not knowing what would have become of Dumby’s life with his incredible talent and moral character. This sadness also encourages Blacky to act decisively at last, so that his own story may have a satisfying ending.
Themes
Blacky picks an adventure book from the children’s section, but the library has no chairs to read in, probably so that the town drunks don’t hang out there all day. Blacky stays there to read anyway, until Mrs. Ashburner makes him leave because the library is closing.
The mention of the town drunks and the lack of chairs reemphasizes the hopelessness of Blacky’s town. Mrs. Ashburner is yet another adult who fails to help Blacky, reinforcing the idea that there’s little use in relying on conventional role models for moral guidance..
Themes
Blacky walks down main street, hoping no one recognizes him. He sees his father through the pub window. His father is talking to the new pub owner, who is just as fat and sweaty as Big Mac. Blacky knows he’ll be safe for a while now because his father will be drinking all day.
The replacement of Big Mac with a man similar in appearance to him symbolizes the repetitive, cyclical nature of racism when it goes unchallenged as the status quo of a society.
Themes
Darcy is the only person on the jetty. He is fishing in front of the graffitied shelter. Blacky talks to him about maggots and gets him to recite the usual poem, “Kaiser Bill.” The wind becomes too strong to fish so they go inside the shelter, where Blacky asks Darcy who he thinks wrote the “Boongs piss off” graffiti. Blacky ask whether or not someone should do something about the graffiti. Darcy says someone should and smiles, but Blacky thinks Darcy might be making fun of him.
Blacky cannot return to his casual conversations of fishing and the “Kaiser Bill” poetry. Because of his friendship with Dumby and Dumby’s death, he feels compelled to struggle with the racism of his town. Darcy is perhaps smiling because he’s waiting for Blacky to realize that Blacky himself must be the “someone.”
Themes
Sharon is peeling potatoes in the kitchen when Blacky finally returns home. Their mother is still out of town looking after their sick grandfather. Their father is supposed to be watching the children, but as usual, he is at the pub. Mom took her false teeth from the drawer and left the kids some money to buy meat for dinner.
In the absence of their mother, it is the older siblings, not the father, who take care of the household chores. This shows both their father’s failure to perform his duty as a parent and the siblings’ ability to make an effort to support each other.
Themes
Blacky goes to the town butcher, Slogs, to buy meat. He buys some sausages and is about to leave when he notices that the handwriting on the butcher shop sign looks exactly like the handwriting on the “Boongs piss off” graffiti. Blacky remembers how on the night in the pub when Big Mac told the joke about the boong and the priest, Slogs laughed more than anyone else there. Blacky wants to take action now that he knows Slogs wrote the graffiti, but he knows calling the police or confronting Slogs wouldn’t be effective.
Blacky’s realization that Slogs wrote the graffiti shows how even the most normal, unassuming members of one’s community can commit racist acts. This opens Blacky’s eyes to the pervasiveness of racism in his society, since racist language is so normal even the town butcher is graffitiing it.
Themes
On the way back home, Blacky passes Darcy’s house. He thinks of Darcy’s response to the graffiti: “They should really do something about that. They really should.” Blacky realizes there is no “they,” and even if there were, “they” would probably be too busy. But Blacky isn’t too busy. He will get rid of the graffiti himself.
Blacky realizes how the adults in his town use language to put off responsibility for confronting racism. He knows now that if he wants to oppose racism, he must take responsibility himself and sacrifice his own time and comfort to do so. In other words, just thinking that racism is wrong isn’t enough; it’s necessary to take action to combat it.
Themes
