Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Eleanor and Park, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Adolescence and Shame
Love and Intimacy
Poverty and Class
Family and Abuse
Summary
Analysis
Park promises Eleanor that he will come for her after his parents are asleep, touching her chin before leaving and heading back in the house. Eleanor sits down at the table, exhausted. She wishes she could sleep for a little while, but her mind is racing with guilt and fear—she feels guilty about leaving her siblings behind, and worries that Richie is out looking for her somewhere or that her mother has called the police. She wishes she could go back for Maisie and the others, and knows that if she were “brave and noble” like a character in a book, she might. In reality, though, she thinks, she’s just a girl “trying to get through the night.”
As Eleanor waits for Park to help her escape, the guilt she felt earlier in the novel—when Maisie asked Eleanor to take her and Ben with her to Park’s—resurges in full force. Eleanor knows that she should help her siblings escape Richie’s house, but that to do so would only be putting herself in further danger.
Themes
Park heads inside and goes up to his bedroom. He reaches into his sock drawer for his leftover Christmas money and pulls out 60 dollars—he hopes it will be enough for gas. Park writes his parents a note, explaining that he’s had to help Eleanor through an emergency. He is planning to steal his mother’s keys and sneak out the kitchen door once both his parents are asleep. Park waits until his father comes home and everything goes quiet—by that time, it is well after two in the morning. He stealthily grabs his backpack, heads downstairs, retrieves the keys, and begins to open the kitchen door when his father’s voice stops him and asks where he’s going.
Park is determined to help Eleanor, even if it risks further straining his relationship with his parents by doing the one thing they have a sore spot about him doing: driving. Park’s devotion to Eleanor is the most important thing in his life, and he is determined to help her escape her dangerous present.
Themes
Park explains that Eleanor needs help, and is running away from home to escape her stepdad. Jamie asks if they need to call the police, but Park tries to explain how tenuous the situation at Eleanor’s home is. When Park tells his dad that he’s driving Eleanor to Minnesota, Jamie is nervous for them—but admits he can’t think of a better plan, and gives Park his blessing to go. He hands Park some money and urges him to take the truck before reminding him that if anything goes wrong, he should bring Eleanor back here. As Park gets Eleanor into the truck, starts it up, and smoothly rolls out of the driveway, he begrudgingly gives thanks that he’s able to drive a stick-shift car.
Park and his father have been fighting for months over Park’s refusal to do things Jamie’s way—and over Jamie’s refusal to let Park carve out his own path, Now, they finally reach a kind of compromise as Park realizes that his father has only been trying to help him all along, and Jamie realizes that Park is indeed capable enough to make his own way through the world.
Themes
