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
For the last hour, Inej has listened to fellow detained guests gripe. She loudly insists the guards take them to the gate. But before the angry guard can lead Inej away, Tante Heleen appears, enraged, and tells the guard that Inej isn’t “her girl”: she’s with Kaz Brekker, a Ketterdam criminal. Heleen grips Inej’s arm and asks where her Suli girl is. For a moment, Inej feels herself leaving her body, which only seems to cause her pain. But then she realizes her body is strong and has helped her survive—it climbed six stories up an incinerator shaft. Inej grabs Heleen’s throat and says she threw Heleen’s girl in the moat. As Heleen shrieks that Kaz is no doubt here too, the Black Protocol alarms sound. Inej refuses to answer the guard’s questions as they drag her away—and Heleen cackles that Inej will hang wearing the Menagerie’s silks.
As Inej faces Heleen for a final time, she shows how much she’s grown and transformed over the novel. While she initially experiences another trauma response, Inej manages to remind herself how strong she is—and that by climbing up the incinerator shaft, she found her purpose and proved to herself that her body can do great things. As she chokes Heleen, Inej then gets to take some revenge on her former mistress.
Themes
