Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Medicine Walk, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Fathers and Sons
Nature and the Land
Identity and Heritage
Memory and Story
Love, Loss, and Grief
Summary
Analysis
The town sits in a river valley. The kid doesn’t like coming here. The local kids make fun of him and sometimes even throw stones at him. People here aren’t used to seeing horses on the roadways and sometimes honk or stare. When the kid reaches the main part of town, he turns the horse down a side street where the houses are slightly dilapidated. He boards the horse at a little five-acre farm. The people there know the old man.
It’s implied that the kid’s ordeal in coming to town has to do, at least partly, with the fact that he’s Indian. And his backcountry lifestyle doesn’t fit in this environment. The dissonance between the kid and the town anticipates the discord between him and his father.
Themes
After tending his horse, the kid walks out into the chill purple evening. In the seedier part of town, he passes dank bars and moves toward a row of rooming houses along the riverbank. He crosses paths with a drunk woman on the sidewalk and asks her if she knows Eldon Starlight. She asks for a smoke, and she winks at him as she lights it. Then she laughs and wonders what he wants with the “old lech,” whom she calls “Twinkles.” She tells him where the man can be found, but not without offering him a good time instead. He declines. She says, “Suit yourself […] Indian.”
The kid’s father doesn’t live in the nicest part of town, suggesting his circumstances are poor. The kid’s encounter with the drunken woman also shows what kind of company Eldon keeps—people who like to drink and are out for a “good time.” The way she calls the kid “Indian,” like an epithet, shows how the kid gets reduced to, and mocked, for his racial identity.
Themes
