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Book 2, Chapter 8
Themes
and Colors
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
Winter and the freezing cold arrives suddenly, shocking Claire with rain, sleet, and wind. One morning, Claire joins Alys in visiting Bryn to check on the baby, Elen. But Claire excuses herself to visit Einar, who is probably lonely. Einar isn’t in his shed, but Claire finds him trying to put salve on a sheep’s wounded leg. She helps, and then he invites her back to his shed to warm up. Once the fire is bigger, Claire says she came because she knows Einar climbed out once—and she wants to know how. But Einar says that he has to tell her why he did it first.
Claire can’t escape the fact that everything here is still new to her—her original community didn’t really experience seasons, so a harsh winter is a totally new experience. While she visits Einar mostly because she wants to hear about how he climbed out, she also demonstrates her empathy and her caring nature here by visiting, partially because she figures he's lonely.
Active
Themes
Einar says that his mother died giving birth to him. Einar’s father, a fisherman, was a “hard” man. Alys had to keep him from throwing newborn Einar into the fire for killing his wife. Village women raised Einar until his father decided Einar was old enough to “pay” for what he did. Einar was six. His father took him out to sea every day. He never said anything kind to Einar. He'd kick Einar, laugh at him, and said he wanted Einar to fall overboard and drown. Einar says that while he grew strong and tall, he didn’t fight back. He was “like a wife” in that he cooked and did laundry, and he was forced to be “a wife in other ways too terrible to mention.” Einar waited until he was old, strong, and brave enough to climb out. And the climb up was fine; “[i]t went wrong after.”
Einar’s story makes it clear that pain, trauma, and heartbreak certainly exist in this village. He mentions various types of abuse, from physical and verbal to sexual (being “a wife in other ways too terrible to mention”). Still, the trauma Einar experienced was motivating, in a way: it was the reason he climbed out, as he wanted to escape his father. And he did so. For now, though, the narrative leaves it ambiguous as to what exactly happened “after.”
Active
Themes
Einar asks why Claire wants to know about this. She explains that she has to climb out, as her son is out there. Claire can tell Einar knew that, but he isn’t scornful and he doesn’t laugh. Instead, he says it’s probably better to climb out after something good than to try to run from something. He holds an arm out and asks her to push on it as hard as she can. Claire can’t move his arm, though he says she’s strong. He says she needs to strengthen herself, probably over the next several years. But Claire just asks how to begin.
