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Part 2, Chapter 14: Choice
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in From the Ashes, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Homelessness and Identity
Overcoming Past Trauma
Love and Redemption
Loyalty vs. Self-Preservation
Summary
Analysis
Josh, like Jerry, has also become interested in his indigenous roots and is also a good student. When he’s in front of his friends, Jesse mocks his brothers for their interest in Indigenous culture and for their solemnity. One day, while smoking pot outside school, Jesse sees Josh walk out by himself in tears and then collapse. As a crowd forms, Josh gasps that he saw a horrible vision of Jesse. Jesse laughs it off to his friends as some wacky Indian thing, from which he distances himself.
As Josh and Jerry both now embrace their studies as well as their Indigenous heritage, Jesse increasingly emerges as an outlier in the family—he is the sibling who just can’t get his life on track. This painful scene of Jesse scoffing at Josh’s physical distress at his (accurate) vision of Jesse’s future recalls the pact the brothers once made as children to stick by each other no matter what.
Active
Themes
