Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in H is for Hawk, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Living with the Wild
Fear, Grief, and Loss
Love, Trust, and Freedom
Time and History
Social Divisions
Summary
Analysis
When Macdonald learns of her father’s death, she struggles to understand the news. She insists on keeping the dinner reservation she and her friend Christina have made, even though she can’t bring herself to eat. When the waiter learns the situation, he brings Macdonald a huge, chocolatey dessert meant as a condolence. But she takes one look at the cut sprig of mint that adorns it and can think of nothing but loss. The plant will never grow again.
Macdonald’s grief shakes her world, making it impossible for her to look at anything in the same way after her father’s death. Her decision to go on to her dinner reservation likely demonstrates shock, but it also epitomizes the way she’ll try to handle her sadness in the coming months by pretending it's not there even though it’s inescapable.
Themes
The next days are full of surreal experiences as Macdonald and her family struggle to comprehend their bereavement. She and her mother retrieve her father’s personal effects from the hospital. Crossing the Thames River on their way home, Macdonald remembers her father’s quest to photograph every single one of the Thames’ bridges, an eccentric weekend side project on which she sometimes accompanied him. They must take his death certificate to the impound lot to retrieve the car he inadvertently abandoned when he collapsed.
By photographing the Thames’ bridges, Macdonald’s father charts the ways that humans interact with the world around them. Furthermore, he stakes a claim to his share in the history of the river and of his country. Yet, his death offers a poignant reminder that, like the river itself, time flows in one direction only. Macdonald can revisit the pictures but can never reexperience helping her dad take them.
Themes
After the funeral, Macdonald goes back to Cambridge, caught in the inevitable madness of grief. With retrospect, she knows that her manic search for meaning was her mind’s way of trying to build a new life in the wake of her father’s death. But since she lacked the usual sources of grounding—a partner, children, a nine-to-five job—she latched onto wild, unhelpful things. She decides that a summer of apocalyptic rainstorms means that the world is grieving with her. She looks for answers in stacks of books on grief. She wants someone, anyone to fill the hole in her heart.
In the early days following her father’s death, Macdonald understands that she has to figure out how to live in a world without her father, but she betrays her own impatience to get the pain over with. She tries to reframe her father’s death as a natural disaster as if she wants other people to take parts of her pain on for her, and she looks for answers to cheat the system in books. Already, she’s trying to escape rather than deal with her pain.
Themes
It’s in this phase of Macdonald’s grief that she begins dreaming of goshawks, specifically one that she saw while volunteering at a bird-of-prey center. Someone had brought the concussed animal in for a checkup. Luckily, she was unharmed. More than that: she was perfect, majestic. Intimidating. Macdonald remembers feeling that the bird was bigger and more important than herself. The dreams make Macdonald’s own hawk inevitable.
Two things stand out in Macdonald’s description of the wild goshawk: the way it possesses the perfect power of wildness and the way it’s almost magically impervious to harm. In dreaming of the bird, Macdonald dreams of accessing a power that will stop her from feeling the inevitable pain of loss—something that is, of course, impossible.
Themes
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