Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in NW, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Class Identity and Social Mobility
Geography and Human Connection
Sex and Relationships
Altruism
Summary
Analysis
Natalie goes out walking and passes Leah’s place. She sees a lot of police cars blocking off Albert Road. Unable to walk down Albert Road, she instead heads toward Caldwell. As she considers climbing over Caldwell’s wall, Nathan suddenly finds her. He says she doesn’t look well, and he helps her climb over.
After a journey into the past, the novel again returns to the fateful evening of the stabbing on Albert Road. Natalie’s decision to head toward Caldwell suggests that she wants to go back to what she had before she met Frank.
Themes
Nathan has big, glassy pupils. He mentions how long it’s been since he last saw “Keisha” (now Natalie). As Natalie and Nathan go around the estate and get to talking, Natalie starts to cry. Nathan reassures her that Frank will take her back, but Natalie says he shouldn’t.
Nathan’s eyes suggest that he is on drugs. His use of the old name “Keisha” emphasizes how this whole walk back to Caldwell is a return to the past for Natalie, to see everything she left behind.
Themes
Nathan asks Natalie to list some people she remembers from Caldwell. She mentions Leah and Rodney, and Nathan says he just spoke with Rodney not too long ago. Rodney runs a dry-cleaning business in Wembley. Natalie mentions how Leah used to be obsessed with Nathan when they were younger. Nathan says few people still remember what he was like back in the day, when he used to get all the gold stars in school.
Although Natalie has tried to distance herself from her old life, when she talks with Nathan, she begins to reconsider her choices. There may have been a time in her life when she considered Rodney a failure for “only” starting a dry-cleaning business, but now she can see that Frank’s “successful” life comes with its own downsides.
Themes
Nathan stops to smoke something that he’s pre-rolled, and Natalie agrees to take some too, although she doesn’t know what it is. The come next to a cemetery, and Natalie wants to climb inside, but Nathan thinks that’s crazy. Natalie asks Nathan if he ever had kids, and he said he didn’t. He figures having kids is just a death sentence for them. Natalie wishes she and Nathan had had more chances to talk.
Natalie’s desire to climb into the cemetery could be interpreted as having a suicidal component to it. Frank discovered Natalie doing something sexual that she feels ashamed of (meeting up with strangers from the internet), and this has echoes of the first time that Natalie considered suicide (when Marcia discovered the dildo Leah gave her).
Themes
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Nathan and Natalie watch a fox sneaking through the cemetery. Nathan asks Natalie how she managed to get a career as a barrister, but she says it all just kind of happened. Nathan regrets how so many people in life have stopped talking to him, and he thinks his heart is racing because he put too much speed into the mixture they smoked. He mentions a friend named Tyler who always takes things too far and who Nathan wasn’t able to stop recently. Nathan says he shouldn’t even be talking right now—he should be fleeing the area. Natalie encourages him to take deep breaths and come walking with her.
This passage strongly implies that Nathan’s friend Tyler is the one who stabbed Felix, and that Nathan is currently on drugs as a way to try to escape that reality. Just as Natalie has had suicidal feelings at times, Nathan seems to be refusing to flee due to self-destructive impulses of his own. Although this revelation should be shocking to Natalie, perhaps she is able to sympathize with him, feeling that she is in a similarly impossible situation.
Themes
