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
Guards march Inej back into the prison, and Inej makes herself trip to buy some time. Just as they threaten her, she hears more guards coming. She begins to fight the guards. Before she can take down the ones on either side of her, one of the approaching guards, who’s actually Jesper, stabs him. Wylan is the other guard. Inej pulls out Tante Heleen’s massive diamond choker and tells Jesper and Wylan to get to work. This was what Kaz told Inej to do: get a “big enough” diamond and make it back to this prison corridor next to the glass enclosure. Inej’s personal goal was to get revenge on Heleen, hence stealing her beloved choker. Now, Jesper and Wylan begin fashioning a huge drill out of the winch mechanism from the gatehouse and the diamond, which Jesper cuts into a perfect drill bit.
The reveal that Inej stole Tante Heleen’s diamond choker shows readers that Inej has truly overcome her past trauma and gotten revenge. But unlike Kaz, who wants revenge on Pekka Rollins and just wants to tear others down, Inej stealing the diamond has a purpose beyond just hurting Heleen. It’s going to help her friends escape the Ice Court, it seems, and propel Inej toward her bright future catching slavers. Hers is productive, while Kaz’s is more of a scorched-earth approach.
Themes
As guards pound on the door and appear across the glass enclosure, Jesper and Wylan begin hand-turning the drill. The glass, as Nina noted earlier, is bulletproof Fabrikator glass, and the only thing harder is diamond. Jesper sketches out a circle with the drill and then hands it off to Wylan while he prepares to shoot at the guards ready to burst through the door. Just as Wylan finishes cutting the hole in the glass, Inej leaps through it, feeling as though Tante Heleen’s silks are “feathers” helping her fly. She swings from a lantern, reaches the wall, and makes her way down to the tank and inside its dome. Inej shoots one of the smaller guns at the glass to warn Jesper and Wylan, and then she pulls the lever—and a massive mortar shatters the glass. Wylan and Jesper climb down and join Inej in the tank.
Jesper, Wylan, and Inej work together to take the tank, using all of their respective skills to support one another. Wylan gets to use his scientific prowess, while Jesper uses his fabrikating and shooting abilities and Inej can draw on her early training as an acrobat. As she feels the Menagerie’s silks are “feathers” helping her now, it again drives home that she’s moved past her trauma and that she now sees past traumatic events as parts of her life that can help inform how she moves forward.
Themes
Jesper takes over driving, cackling at the (to him) satisfying engine while Inej joins Wylan in the tank’s turret and shoots the smaller gun at the guards. After shooting out all the glass and then blowing a small hole in the Ice Court’s outer ringwall, Jesper races the tank at the wall and bursts through it. Wylan laughs as he looks back at the hole in the white stone wall, and Inej notices that they’re trailing the prison’s “Fjerdan might” banner in the tank’s tread.
It’s significant that in stealing the tank, the three also end up taking the “Fjerdan might” banner with them. Clearly, the Fjerdans aren’t as mighty as they thought, given that a group of six kids has been able to break in, rescue a prisoner, and steal a tank. “Fjerdan might,” this suggests, is an illusion more than a reality.
Themes
