Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Son of a Trickster, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Dysfunctional Families, Responsibility, and Maturity
Love vs. Violence
Escapism and Confronting Problems
The Environment and Human Destruction
Summary
Analysis
Two hundred fifty-two million years ago on Earth, the trilobites were “going out for Starbucks before work.” They avoided the mammals and reptiles—anything that could eat them. They had survived for 200 million years and had made it through an extinction event only 8 million years earlier. But a new age dawned: Earth had a huge amount of gas, asteroids smashed through the sky, and a volcano erupted, taking out 9 out of 10 species. The world went dark, and the ocean became an acid bath. The trilobites were blindsided by the end of the world, saying, “whoa, man. What the hell?” All of them died.
This passage from the unnamed narrator again touches on environmental destruction. This passage references Earth’s most severe mass extinction event, the Permian-Triassic extinction event. By anthropomorphizing the trilobites (attributing human speech and behavior to them), the narrator suggests that human beings could be just as blindsided by an extinction event. And given that the novel has already mentioned the Anthropocene (the ongoing human-driven extinction event), this implies that people’s environmental destruction could cause their own extinction.
Themes
