Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Native Speaker, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Identity and Multiculturalism
Silence, Language, and Communication
Racism and Xenophobia
Love, Loss, and Moving On
Summary
Analysis
Henry and Lelia’s son, Mitt, died at the age of seven. He had a close relationship with Henry’s father, who was patient and attentive to him. Mitt had a good time with the old man each summer, when the family would travel north of the city to live for the hottest months of the year. When the other children in the neighborhood called Mitt racist names, Henry and his father went around to their houses and spoke to their parents.
Mitt is the first person on his father’s side of the family to spend his entire childhood in the United States. Of course, Henry came to the country when he was very young, but he grew up in a household in which Korean culture was very strong, since his parents moved to the United States after decades of living in Korea. Mitt, on the other hand, grew up with a native-born American mother and a Korean American father, so he’s deeply entrenched in American culture—and yet, he still faces racism from the children around him, which underscores how hard it is to escape bigotry in a nation that is so unwelcoming of immigrants.
Themes
This experience reminded Henry of what happened when he was a kid and other boys called him racist names: his father went around to the houses of the boys who called Henry names, but he acquiesced to their parents and quickly accepted their apologies. When the same happened to Mitt, though, Henry’s father lost his temper and started yelling on the doorstep of one boy’s house. As he was shouting in Korean, Henry wanted him to stop—but he didn’t interfere, wanting to let his father do this for Mitt’s sake.
Henry clearly wishes that his father stood up for him a bit more when he was a child dealing with his racist peers. In his adulthood, then, he appreciates watching his father finally take a stand on Mitt’s behalf. For such a reserved man to yell like this is a sure sign of his love—love that he was never quite able to express so clearly for Henry.
Themes
Despite the initial problems with the other children in Ardsley, Mitt soon became friends with everyone in the neighborhood. The accident happened at a birthday party—Henry had just come back from the store with more candy and soda, and there was a terrible commotion. He ran to the backyard and found Lelia cradling Mitt’s head. Apparently, there had been a dog pile, with the kids all jumping on one another and having fun until they realized Mitt had been crushed at the very bottom. Mitt was already dead.
The novel has already explored the terrible aftermath of Mitt’s death, but now it reveals how, exactly, he died. There’s a certain metaphorical element to his death, since he was suffocated by white American children, perhaps representing the crushing influence of American culture on Korean Americans. The novel has previously considered the many ways in which it’s hard to stay closely connected to one’s own culture after acclimating to life in the United States, and Mitt’s death ultimately aligns with this idea.
Themes
After Mitt’s death, Henry would stay up late. When he’d finally go to bed, he would pull Lelia on top of him, feeling her body weight pressing down. They’d often have sex like that, but in the morning they would go their separate ways. Lelia would leave before he woke up, and then he’d spend the morning in deep thought.
Dealing with the terrible grief of Mitt’s death, Lelia and Henry only seem to have connected at night, when Lelia was mostly asleep. And though they were physically connecting by having sex, the novel suggests that this physical connection isn’t a substitute for talking about their grief. Mitt’s death thus pushed them each into their own separate worlds, ultimately driving a wedge between them and making it harder to cope with their loss.
Themes
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Mitt used to play with a tape recorder from Henry’s work. He liked saying things and playing them back, but he also liked catching snippets of life. Henry knows Lelia still has the tapes of Mitt’s voice. She’s back from Italy, so he calls her at their mutual friend’s apartment (where she’s been staying). They’ve already planned to meet the following week, so Lelia tells him he can fetch the tapes while she’s not there, not wanting to deviate from their original plan. He agrees and spends the day listening to the tapes. Most of the recordings are of conversations between Lelia and Mitt. One, however, is a recording Mitt and Lelia made for Henry on his birthday. They each say “I love you,” causing Henry to think about how he himself has never been comfortable declaring his love.
Henry’s desire to listen to the tapes of Mitt’s voice suggests that he’s ready to think about the tragic loss. Before this, it seems, he was reluctant to do anything but move forward with life, as evidenced by Lelia’s frustration with him and her decision to leave. His response, however, makes sense within the context of his upbringing, since his father modeled stoicism and silence in the face of hardship. Nonetheless, Henry has now decided to recognize that he’s hurting, and instead of throwing himself into work or somehow figuring out a way to think about something else, he listens to the recordings of Mitt.
Themes
That night, Henry goes to the apartment of his and Lelia’s mutual friend. He stands outside the window until Lelia opens it and tells him to come up. It’s late, but their friend isn’t back yet from a date—in fact, it looks like she won’t be back at all. Lelia chastises Henry for not sticking to their original plan of meeting the following week. He’s always catching her off guard, she says, accusing him of doing so intentionally. Whenever he calls, for instance, she has always just walked in the door. But she forgives him. She has recently cut her own hair, and though he insists that it looks good, she knows he’s lying—it looks terrible.
Lelia’s comment about Henry always catching her off guard spotlights the trouble she has reading him. She seems to have a hard time predicting what he might do, and though this might seem like a failure on her part, it’s more likely related to the fact that Henry is a very private, insular person. He is, after all, a spy, and even his wife appears to find him somewhat mystifying—a dynamic that has caused tension in their relationship.
Themes
Henry tells Lelia that he has listened to the tapes of Mitt. She herself hasn’t listened to them for a while, since doing so always means she has to lie down for days on end, unable to do anything. But it used to be worse. She used to sit on the windowsill with her legs dangling in the air, not caring if she looked like she was going to jump. Henry admits that this always terrified him, but Lelia just laughs—he should have seen what she was like when he wasn’t home. He was lucky, in that way, since he had something to do. He could always escape and spend time with Jack.
Lelia’s remark about how Henry could always escape to spend time with Jack is a subtle critique of Henry’s tendency to disappear when faced with emotional hardship—whether that disappearance is literal or metaphorical. While Henry kept his feelings inside and went on with his life, Lelia did the exact opposite: she allowed her sorrow to be on full display, even sitting on the ledge of her window so that everyone could see just how little she cared about her own life anymore.
Themes
Lelia and Henry start drinking. They’re still talking about Mitt, but in roundabout ways. Lelia feels bad about how she treated the people in her life after their son’s death, but Henry says she was just in pain—and so was he, he adds. Lelia, however, points out that he hid his pain very well. He kept calm and always assured people that they were doing fine. Meanwhile, Lelia was unraveling with grief.
Lelia explicitly states what the novel has already implied—namely, that Henry hid his grief and put on a brave face in front of everyone else, refusing to let his sorrow show. And by keeping his feelings bottled up, he inadvertently made Lelia feel like she was dealing with their loss on her own.
Themes
The conversation slowly shifts to other matters, as Henry asks how Lelia’s parents are doing. Her mother lives alone and is something of a shut-in. Her father, Stew, is an alcoholic businessman who has known great success. Early in Henry and Lelia’s marriage, he told Henry that he didn’t approve of their relationship at first because of the fact that Henry is Korean. But he insisted that he’d changed his mind, saying that he liked Henry and urging him to have babies with Lelia very soon. He said he didn’t care what the kids would look like—he just wanted grandchildren.
Stew’s statement about not caring what his grandchildren look like is problematic, despite the fact that he says it to prove that he has an enlightened, inclusive worldview. That he would even think to say such a thing makes it quite clear that he would rather his grandchildren be completely white. This sentiment aligns with his initial dislike of Henry, which was based on nothing but Henry’s race and cultural background. The tricky thing, though, is that Henry is expected to simply take all of this in stride. Because Stew now claims to like him, he expects Henry to not take offense at these racist thoughts. The entire interaction thus serves as a good example of the kind of casual, everyday racism that is so prevalent in the United States.
Themes
It’s now two in the morning. Henry and Lelia are lying next to each other, but they’re not touching. He asks if she has been writing, and she says that she’s only been composing letters—a comment that sparks some tension, as Henry desperately wants to know who, exactly, she’s communicating with. The conversation snakes its way toward her time in Italy, with Henry begging her to tell him the name of the man she surely became involved with in Italy. But she refuses. It won’t do any good. Plus, she insists, the other man is unimportant, at least to their relationship.
Lelia refuses to say anything about her time in Italy, but she doesn’t deny that she had an affair. Instead, she simply says that it would only do harm to her relationship with Henry if they talked about what happened in Italy—a clear indication that she had an extramarital affair. Henry, interestingly, desperately wants to know about the affair: while he doesn’t normally have a problem keeping secrets from people, he’s very unhappy now that Lelia is keeping a secret from him.
Themes
Henry presses Lelia for more details. He wants to know what she told the other man about him, so she explains that she said she was separated. The man assumed this meant she was divorced, and she didn’t correct him. She also told him that she never knew how Henry felt about anything. She still never knows what goes on in his head. She also doesn’t know what he needs out of life. She spent a lot of time in Italy thinking about his job and all of the things she doesn’t know about his professional life.
Again, Lelia very clearly outlines the main thing that came between her and Henry: that is, his insular, secretive way of moving through the world. Seemingly every aspect of his life is blocked off from her, since he won’t talk about his emotions and can’t even tell her much about his job. As a result, she finds it increasingly difficult to connect with him as a romantic partner.
Themes
The secrecy surrounding Henry’s job still troubles Lelia. She doesn’t like that he can spend the day pretending to be someone else and then casually come home and act like he’s simply reentering his actual life. It makes her feel cut off from important parts of him, and that causes her to question who he really is. As she explains this, Henry isn’t sure what to say. The truth is, he feels deeply grateful for Dennis Hoagland, who recruited him for a job that has allowed him to find his “truest place in the culture” of the United States.
Henry comes from a family (and culture) that generally values silent resilience in the face of hardship, whereas open communication tends to be emphasized more in American culture. Essentially, Henry just isn’t in the habit of expressing himself in the way Lelia wants him to. And for all of his misgivings about Hoagland, Henry can’t help but feel grateful that his boss gave him a job that has allowed him to occupy a societal position that is familiar to him—namely, the in-between, transitional life of a spy, which, the novel implies, shares some similarities with Henry’s experience of navigating his own multicultural identity.
Themes
Henry insists that the only thing Lelia needs to know about him is that he wants to be with her. She is his real life. But she isn’t so sure. She’s disoriented by the fact that Henry never says Mitt’s name and never talks about what happened. He says that what happened to Mitt was nothing more than a horrible accident, but she objects—it was so much more than that. It couldn’t have been an “accident,” because, as she puts it, “when your baby dies it’s never an accident.” She’s crying now, but Henry doesn’t touch her. Instead, he lies next to her and experiences what it feels like to be so close that he can feel the heat of his own skin reflecting back at him from hers.
The conversation Henry and Lelia have in this scene is the kind of difficult, emotionally raw discussion Lelia has been waiting so long to have. It’s not that the conversation solves anything: as Lelia makes quite clear, there’s no way to fix what happened to Mitt, and Henry still doesn’t seem to entirely understand where Lelia is coming from. Still, though, the mere act of finally talking about these difficult feelings is cathartic, effectively clearing the air between Henry and Lelia.
Themes
