Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Elatsoe, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Family and Friendship
Justice
Cultural Identity and Coming of Age
Colonialism and Monsters
Death, Grief, and Healing
Storytelling
Summary
Analysis
Ellie meets Jay and Aunt Bell in McAllen, the closest city with a Ring Center. They go to get tacos first, and Jay explains to his aunt how, it seems, Trevor died. Then, they begin the drive to the deserted road. Aunt Bell is an awful backseat driver. As they pass a strip mall, she shouts for Ellie to stop—she saw a girl run into the road. Moments later, the girl and her mom come out of a store, and the girl is in a cast and has a bruised face. Aunt Bell isn’t sure why she’s seeing so much today.
Getting this time in the car with Aunt Bell well before reaching the site of Trevor’s death allows Ellie to understand just how much of a fraud Chloe was. Aunt Bell isn’t even looking for other traumatic events, and yet she’s seeing them anyway. This gives Aunt Bell more credibility.
Themes
Almost an hour later, they reach the spot where they found Trevor. Aunt Bell can sense “concern,” and she channels the voice of the farmer who found Trevor, but she insists that Trevor didn’t die here: there’s no violence or change here. Trevor was killed elsewhere and moved here. This, Ellie suggests, explains why Trevor was found here, where he had no business being: he didn’t choose to come here.
Things begin to fall into place, and it suggests that Dr. Allerton worked hard to cover up Trevor’s death by moving the body some distance.
Themes
Jay suggests they drive Trevor’s usual route home from work to see if Aunt Bell can sense anything along the way. They start at the elementary school and, just after a bridge, Jay notices disturbed plants and tire skids. Ellie pulls over. The road runs along the top of a valley, which goes down steeply. A trail leads to a tree with a huge gash in the trunk. Ellie commands Kirby to keep watch, approaches the tree, and begins taking video with her phone. She narrates, points to the damage, and finds glass and paint residue on the ground. By now, Jay and Aunt Bell have caught up. Aunt Bell grips Ellie’s arm and says that two people suffered in this spot. Then, Aunt Bell speaks in Trevor’s voice. He offers to call for help—and then asks someone to stop. He screams.
Finding the real spot where Trevor dies is extremely instructive: Trevor died here, but he wasn’t the one who got in a car crash. Indeed, Trevor’s kind, community-oriented nature shines through here, as he seems to have just stopped to help the person who actually crashed their car. As Ellie’s dad suggested earlier, it seems increasingly unlikely that there’s going to be any satisfying explanation for why Dr. Allerton killed Trevor. And the fact that Trevor was killed while trying to help someone makes this even clearer.
Themes
