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
Hundreds of people attend the memorial for Macdonald’s father. Macdonald’s eulogy centers around two anecdotes, one about her father’s habit of always wearing a suit. The second describes the time he sighted a new American aircraft at a Royal Airforce base. He snapped a picture of it and recorded its registration number in his notebook…and then found himself detained by base security. They took his film and the page of his notebook before sending him home. But, by rubbing his pencil over the indentations on the next page of his notebook, he was able to retrieve his notes, if not the picture. Macdonald doesn’t know what kind of plane it was, though, and she couldn’t call her father to ask.
The memorial service proves that, while Macdonald’s father is gone, he is not—and will not be—forgotten. His memory lives on in his community. And it does so through acts of storytelling like his daughter’s. The story illustrates key features about the father: the perseverance, doggedness, and attentiveness that made him a good photojournalist. These are traits Macdonald herself shares. In a way, then, her father lives on in her, too. And the anecdote about the notebook reflects the work Macdonald is trying to do in her own life at the moment in uncovering the vestiges of White’s life to understand her own.
Themes
Afterward, her heart filled by the kindness of the people who attended the memorial, Macdonald rides home on the train. She’s starting to see some of her mistakes. She wanted the wild to cure her grief, but healing comes from being with her own kind, humans. She’d stopped paying attention to Mabel, and the attack came as a surprise because she hadn’t noticed how keen and hungry the bird had become. The next night, watching Mabel happily devour a dead pigeon, Macdonald realizes her third, most crucial mistake. She’d gone to the wild half subconsciously hoping she’d find Gos still alive and lurking in the forest of lost things. And that her father might be there, too.
The memorial gives readers a sense of the large community of people around Macdonald’s father—and for the space of a few hours, at least, these people become her community too, reminding her how good it feels to be surrounded by other people. Importantly, this reprieve from her own isolation gives her insight into the mistakes she’s been making with Mabel. This, in turn, highlights how one-sided their relationship is, in a way. Mabel’s behavior depends almost entirely on Macdonald’s success or failure. The third flash of insight is the most important, because it illuminates one of the book’s key lessons. Macdonald cannot rewind time to escape her grief. She must instead face it.
Themes
