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Chapter 2
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Go, Went, Gone, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Refugee Crisis and Bureaucracy
Compassion and Human Connection
Racism and Prejudice
The Power and Limitations of Language
Summary
Analysis
Back at home, Richard makes sandwiches and a salad for dinner. As he slices the onions for the salad, he considers how he’s been slicing onions all his life and yet only recently learned that there’s a best way to hold the onion while chopping it. One advantage of living alone, he thinks, is that there’s nothing to disrupt his routine. His lover, he recalls, would make fun of him for his need for order. She’d also get annoyed whenever he corrected her. He and his wife, on the other hand, were more or less on the same page about such things. She’d been shot in the legs at the end of the war and probably would’ve died. This taught her “that everything you can’t size up properly is potentially lethal.”
Richard’s many routines distract him from his loneliness, but his need for things to be just so also seems to drive a lot of people away, which seems to be what happened with his lover. But it’s important to note that Richard’s routines aren’t really about him being stubborn or inflexible—they reflect his need to impose order, control, and predictability (or at least the illusion of these things) on his life, a side effect of his postwar childhood. Limiting others from interfering in his habits is one way to create a sense of order and safety, but as Richard’s present circumstances show, it can also leave one rather lonely and isolated.
Active
Themes
Richard and his family left Silesia and settled in Germany when Richard was a baby. In the chaos of the event, he’d almost gotten separated from his parents and would’ve been left behind, had a Russian soldier not handed him to his mother through the train window. Richard’s father had been a soldier in the war, and Richard wonders how many children he separated from their parents during his service. It was two years before he rejoined Richard and Richard’s mother in Berlin. In short, Richard’s and his wife’s respective pasts taught them “never [to] count on freedom from mayhem,” something his young lover could never understand.
Richard’s childhood experiences with war and displacement mirror those of the African refugees he will encounter later in the story. The events he recalls in this passage show that it was merely by chance that Richard and his parents managed to rebuild their lives and regain a sense of stability after the war. Had any detail turned out differently, the “mayhem of war,” as Richard recalls his mother describing it, may have robbed the family of the possibility of a better, stabler future.
Active
Themes
Richard sits down with his dinner and turns on the TV to watch the news. There’s a segment on the hunger strike, and Richard is shocked he didn’t see it when he was in Berlin. He feels a bit ashamed to be eating while the men go hungry, but what is he to do? If their situations were reversed, the hunger-striking man would surely be sitting down to eat dinner just as Richard is doing.
