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 and Vivian are arguing about whether it’s a good idea for Ellie and Jay to visit the bicentennial exhibit at Willowbee’s library when Lenore gets home, her hands crusted in dirt. She admits she was digging around Trevor’s grave before marching off to bed. Vivian insists Lenore won’t successfully wake Trevor up, since it hasn’t happened yet. Still, digging at a grave is like standing under a tree during a lightning storm: it’s inviting disaster. Vivian reasons that while Lenore knows Trevor wouldn’t return “the same,” she probably thinks he’d take revenge on Dr. Allerton and leave everyone else alone.
Vivian is both pragmatic and compassionate as she and Ellie discuss Lenore’s behavior. She knows Lenore is grieving and is behaving irrationally and dangerously, but she also implies that there’s a good chance Lenore will move on in due time, before Trevor’s ghost comes back. Lenore’s possible thought about Trevor’s ghost also mirrors Ellie’s thoughts on Trevor’s ghost from the novel’s first chapters: it’s difficult to comprehend that the ghost of someone so kind and loving would be violent and cruel, but within the world of the novel, this is just how it is.
Themes
Once Vivian goes to bed, Ellie reads Brett’s report on Nathaniel Grace. She reads about Grace burning inside his own church and surviving the ordeal. Brett writes that after this experience, Grace “made friends with other Pilgrims by hurting the people who frightened them more than he did.” Brett goes on to write about the hospitals Grace founded and the lives he saved. A disturbing drawing of a leech accompanies the report’s conclusion, which is that the U.S. wouldn’t be the same and Willowbee, “a good home,” wouldn’t exist without Grace. Ellie knows this is important, but she can’t put the pieces together. Both Grace and Dr. Allerton can hurt and heal, and they may be relatives. But she’s also disgusted, because she knows who the colonists feared the most, and who Nathaniel Grace thus hurt: Native Americans. That night, Ellie has nightmares about Allerton and leeches.
Brett’s report is disturbing on several levels. Many colonizers harmed Native Americans in a variety of ways, but the report suggests Grace made his living and his name specifically because he hurt indigenous people. Additionally, the hospitals and the leech imagery suggest that Grace “saved” people he deemed worthy—and that he perhaps did so by taking from people who had less power, including Native Americans. How exactly he did so is still a mystery, but the report suggests Willowbee and its doctors have a history of preying on vulnerable populations in order to make inroads with powerful people.
Themes
