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Chapter 7
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Remarkably Bright Creatures, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Grief and Memory
Loneliness and Companionship
Family
Closure and Healing
Summary
Analysis
Checking out at the grocery store, Tova notices the new bag boy mishandling her items, stacking them incorrectly in the paper bag. The cashier and store owner, Ethan Mack, makes conversation about the rainy weather before offering his condolences for Lars’s recent passing. However, Tova and her brother weren’t close in their later years, having grown distant after Erik’s disappearance. They were fully estranged by the time Lars died. Before leaving, Tova quietly reorganizes her groceries the “right” way—the way it should have been done to begin with.
Tova’s fixation on the bag boy’s poor grocery arrangement reiterates her deep need for control, which she has gradually come to use as an outlet for her unresolved grief. It’s a coping mechanism, a way to impose order where she feels powerless, so it makes sense that the compulsion would manifest strongly in the wake of Lars’s death, regardless of their estrangement. Tova keeps things neat and orderly not just in her own bags, but in the way she handles Ethan’s—and others’—sympathy.
Active
Themes
Home from the grocery store, Tova turns on the channel four news, the only local news station she watches. She listens to the anchors as she unloads her items, struggling to find a place for everything in her fridge, which is stuffed to the brim with casseroles and other meals from well-intended friends. She hears a scratching at her front door and is surprised to find a stray cat, whom she subsequently feeds the ham gratin Mary Ann had brought over the day before. She names it “Cat.” As the co-anchors banter back-and-forth, Tova correctly predicts every beat—she turns the TV off before the weather report, knowing full well that more drizzle is expected, more “June gloom.”
Active
Themes
