Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Six of Crows, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Greed
Friendship and Difference
Trauma, the Past, and Moving Forward
Identity, Values, and Growing Up
Summary
Analysis
Inej doesn’t know Kaz’s whole plan—and Kaz refuses to tell her. He reminds her that he can always find another “spider” if she doesn’t want to join, and this hurts her feelings. Now, she’s headed for the harbor and wondering why she’s even going with Kaz. She could go back to Ravka and look for her family. That would leave Kaz paying off her indenture. Inej thinks of her parents, who taught her to perform on the high wire and the swings and who taught her about love. She doesn’t know if she’ll ever see her parents again. Further, Inej doesn’t know where she wants her life to go. Her life up to this point has had clear goals—rewards from her father, escaping Tante Heleen—but now, all she wants is for Kaz to apologize.
Inej is lost. Her musings suggest that would like to stay in Ketterdam and work with Kaz—but only if he’s willing to show her the appreciation she craves. She also shows her loyalty and decency here (she wants to pay off her own indenture), as well as alludes to her past trauma. In the present, she’s trying to heal and move forward, but this is difficult when Kaz won’t offer her a truly safe place to live and work.
Themes
Inej is running late, as Kaz sent her to acquire paraffin and snow goggles without telling her why. So she walks through West Stave alone, something she never does. This takes her past the Menagerie, which “stocks” foreign girls who are all known by an animal name, so there’s always a Kaelish mare, for instance, and a Suli lynx. Catching sight of peacock feathers inside, Inej begins to panic. She calms herself by thinking of how Kaz would see the Menagerie as a building full of locks to pick and guards to swindle, and she relaxes as she passes it. But then, someone grabs Inej: Tante Heleen herself, dressed in peacock feathers and her trademark diamond choker. Her “enforcer” blocks Inej’s escape. Tante Heleen threatens to take Inej “home” and force her into the Menagerie’s silks again before leaving Inej on the street.
Inej might be safer with Kaz now, but this episode with Tante Heleen suggests she’s not even close to safe: Tante Heleen clearly wants to enslave Inej again and profit off her. In this context, Inej’s intense anxiety as she passes the Menagerie makes sense, as it’s clearly not a safe place in any sense of the word. But Kaz and his logical way of looking at the world help to comfort Inej prior to Heleen’s assault, pointing to Inej’s feelings for Kaz and the fact that she’s trying valiantly to move forward from her trauma through her work with him.
Themes
Shaking, Inej heads for the harbor, fingering her collection of daggers and reminding herself that she’s not enslaved anymore. She finally reaches the empty harbor late and breaks into a jog, feeling as though the crates and shipping containers are turning the docks into a dangerous maze. Finally, Inej reaches Kaz and the rest of the crew, all of whom are dressed as dockworkers. The little schooner bobs behind Kaz. But as Inej counts the Dregs on the dock, there aren’t enough. Something is wrong—and Inej trips on Dirix, who’s been stabbed to death. The schooner explodes as Inej shouts for Kaz.
Already, Kaz’s plan is experiencing setbacks like this ambush at the docks. Inej is, perhaps, less attuned to the danger around her because she’s so focused on trying to remind herself that she’s not enslaved now, highlighting how her past trauma puts her at a disadvantage—managing it takes up a lot of her energy.
Themes
