Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Son, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Pain and Maternal Love
Travel, Fitting In, and Values
Emotion, Individuality, and the Human Experience
Family and Coming of Age
Community and Sacrifice
Summary
Analysis
At breakfast one morning, Claire studies her coworkers. As a Vessel, Claire fit in, but here, she feels different—and today, she realizes why. Everyone here takes a pill after breakfast. People usually begin taking pills around age 12, but as a Birthmother, Claire was told not to take them. She had asked other Vessels about it, and some of them who had taken the pills before described what it’s like to take them. Without them, you can feel things, like happiness or desire for one’s Product. With them, you don’t feel much of anything—but you don’t really care. Claire’s coworkers, she realizes, feel nothing. Claire is the only one who doesn’t take a pill, and she suspects this is a clerical mistake. So now she feels things. She vows to never let them take her feelings away from her, especially her love for her son. She’d rather die.
Finally, Claire discovers why she feels so attached to Abe and why she experiences boredom, restlessness, and curiosity: she doesn’t take the medicine that robs a person of those things. That Vessels and Birthmothers don’t take the pills suggest that the powers that be here understand, on some level, that feeling things for one’s unborn baby is productive and beneficial. But as Claire’s experience shows, continuing to not take the pills allows a Birthmother to continue to have feelings for their babies, something that, if it were to occur on a larger scale, would jeopardize the entire structure of this community employs. As Claire vows not to give up her love for her son, she asserts what her values are—and they don’t line up with what her community values; namely, conformity.
Themes
