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
The book flashes back to when Jared’s dad lost his job at Eurocan, the local paper mill, after eight years working there. The paper mill’s closure puts over 500 people out of work, and his dad starts to drink a lot while people steadily move out of the neighborhood. A few months later, Jared’s dad moves out, and Jared’s mom cries all the time as she has to start selling their things to pay the bills.
Just after Jared has lost his relationship with his father in the present, the book expands on more of their history, fleshing out how his father became so absent in his life during his parents’ divorce. The book’s reference to Jared’s dad drinking illustrates how he used alcohol to escape the problem of losing his job—and perhaps, as a result, also lost his marriage. This suggests that using alcohol as a form of escapism only makes his problems worse.
Themes
Soon after, Jared’s mom meets David. He brings flowers, pays bills and makes dinner; his mom can’t stop smiling. David expects good grades from Jared, but Jared can’t focus. He starts hanging out with Blake and Kelsey more, so that he can lose himself in gaming and booze, and his grades get worse and worse. Jared hides his report card in the bottom drawer, until one evening when he gets home, David is waiting in his bedroom.
Just as Jared’s father uses alcohol to numb himself and ignore his problems, Jared starts to do the same. In the wake of his parents’ divorce and his father moving out, it makes sense for Jared to try to find a coping mechanism. But the book also underscores that this creates further problems for Jared, like slipping grades, rather than solving the issues that he’s trying to escape from.
Themes
Pinning Jared to the bed, David begins to break Jared’s ribs slowly, and Jared squeals like an injured dog. Then, Jared hears a mechanical thud, and David spasms. Jared’s mom drags Jared off the bed, and David flails around, his feet having been nailed to the floor with a nail gun. Crying, Jared says that he wants to leave, but his mom says that David likes Jared’s fear. She hits David with a chair until he falls over, and she nails his underarm to the floor. She presses the nail gun into Jared’s hand, telling him to show David he isn’t afraid. “The world is hard,” she says. “You have to be harder.”
The book has heavily foreshadowed this traumatic incident with David, and it reveals why Jared has a hard time navigating relationships that mix love and violence. While Jared understands that his mother uses violence to protect him, he is also disturbed by her capacity to hurt David just as David has hurt him. Jared’s mother’s statements about Jared needing to be hard recur throughout the novel (previously, he heard these words in his head while he was crying over Baby Killer’s death), indicating how they seem to haunt Jared. He recognizes the wisdom in the words, but he is also uncomfortable about having to commit violence against others. As such, the book portrays love expressed through violence as confusing and emotionally painful.
Themes
Jared refuses to use the nail gun on David, but his mom won’t let him leave until he does. Suddenly, like a weird dream, Jared pops out of his body and finds himself outside his house. He can still hear David screaming, but it’s day instead of night, and the sky sputters like a TV with a bad connection. Jared walks to the Jakses’ house and wonders if he’s dead. He walks through the front door and feels a little zap like static. He sees Mrs. Jaks, and though she speaks a Native language, he can understand her. He tells her that there’s a bad man in his house who’s hurt.
Up until this point, Jared has dismissed the surrealism in his life as drug-induced hallucinations or evidence that he is going crazy. Here, Jared’s ability to leave his own body, as well as his ability to understand the Native language that Mrs. Jaks is speaking, hint that something supernatural is going on. But, again, he avoids addressing this possibility by telling himself that he’s dead. He’s unwilling to confront the magic in his life, much like he tries to hide from his more practical, everyday problems.
Themes
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Mrs. Jaks then pops out of her own body and walks hand in hand with Jared back to his house. His footprints glow behind him, and he sees an ambulance parked in the driveway. Jared’s mom is crying and saying his name, and he sees himself on the stretcher with blank eyes. Then, Mrs. Jaks lifts Jared up and puts him back in his body.
Again, there seems to be something supernatural going on, as Mrs. Jaks and Jared are inexplicably able to leave their own bodies. Meanwhile, Mrs. Jaks contrasts with Jared’s mom. Whereas Jared’s mom tries to protect him with violence, here Mrs. Jaks provides him with comfort and love, guiding him back to his body when he is hurting and lost. This is why he and Mrs. Jaks have such a strong relationship in the present, because she helped him (rather than pressuring him to commit violence, as his mom did) when he was most vulnerable.
Themes
