The Dew Breaker: The Book of the Dead Summary & Analysis

Ka Bienaimé’s father, Papa, is missing. She is sitting next to two men: the manager of the hotel where she and Papa are staying, Flavio Salinas, and a police officer, Officer Bo. Ka is Haitian, but was born in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, and has never been to Haiti. She explains to Officer Bo that she and Papa are in Florida on their way to Tampa to deliver a sculpture. Ka is not an artist “in the way [she’d] like to be,” but has created many wooden sculptures of her father. She describes her father as 6’5”, with “thinning salt-and-pepper hair” and a scar across his cheek, which he got during the year he spent in prison in Haiti.

Ever since Papa fell off his bed and knocked out his teeth while having one of his “prison nightmares,” he has had to wear dentures. Officer Bo asks if he has any mental illnesses, and Ka responds that he doesn’t. She doesn’t have pictures to give the officer because Papa dislikes having his pictures taken, always putting his hands in front of his face to hide the scar. Officer Bo asks if there is any reason why Papa might have run away, inquiring if he and Ka had a fight. Ka reflects on the fact that the sculpture she made of Papa depicts him kneeling and looking down, as she imagined he would have looked in prison.  

The previous night, before Papa disappeared, he commented that their hotel room was “like paradise.” The sculpture Ka made has cracks along its surface, which she chose not to polish down because she thinks they are “beautiful […] like the wood’s own scars.” Now she worries that they make the sculpture look poorly made. She is going to deliver it to Gabrielle Fonteneau, a well-known Haitian-American actress. Ka’s friend, whom she knows from the school where she is a substitute art teacher, showed Gabrielle a picture of Ka’s sculpture and convinced her to buy it.

Gabrielle is currently visiting her parents in Tampa. Ka imagined that Papa would enjoy meeting Gabrielle because he watches lots of television. Yet now Papa has disappeared, along with Ka’s rental car. Ka chain-smokes while waiting for news of him in the hotel room. She lies in Papa’s unmade bed, which still smells like him. When the Spanish-speaking maid enters and then quickly exits, Ka is reminded of the overly deferential way her mother, Anne, treats non-Haitian clients in her beauty salon. 

Around midday Ka calls the salon, but an employee tells her that Anne is still at Mass. She calls her parents’ house and leaves a voicemail asking Anne to call her back urgently. A few hours later Anne does so, sounding panicked. Ka explains that when she woke up that morning, Papa had disappeared. Anne assures Ka that Papa will come back. Ka then calls Gabrielle, who thanks her for travelling to deliver the sculpture. She adds that she loves it because the figure looks “regal and humble,” like her own father. Gabrielle invites Ka and Papa to lunch the next day, and Ka promises that they will be there.

Papa loves museums, and whenever he has time off from his barbershop he goes to the Brooklyn Museum. He particularly adores the Ancient Egyptian rooms, claiming that Ancient Egyptians are like Haitians because “they know how to grieve.” These trips to the museum are when Papa seems most alive.

Papa reappears at sunset and immediately complains about the smoke in the hotel room. Ka notices that the sculpture is missing, and Papa says he needs to talk to her about it, because he has “objections.” When Ka demands to know where the sculpture is, Papa says he will take her to it. As they get in the car, Ka thinks that Papa must be suffering from a mental illness. She remembers being a child and realizing for the first time that Papa could die.

Papa stops the car on the side of a highway, right next to a man-made lake. He sits on a bench in front of the lake and Ka joins him. Papa confirms that the sculpture is in the lake, and although Ka tries to remain composed, she panics as she realizes that it has probably broken apart in the water. Ordinarily Ka thinks that anger is a “wasted emotion.” As a child, her parents never got angry with her. However, now she feels intensely angry at Papa. He says that he wants to tell her why he named her Ka, a story she has heard many times before.  

Papa explains that in Ancient Egypt, a ka is “a double of the body,” which accompanies the body as a guide in the afterlife. Papa compares a ka to the soul. When Ka was born, Papa felt that she was his “good angel,” and thus chose this name. Switching from English to Haitian Creole, Papa explains that when he first saw Ka’s sculpture, he wanted to be buried with it and take it with him to the afterlife. He asks if Ka remembers when they read The Book of the Dead together. Ka has trouble remembering because she found the book boring.

Suddenly worried, Ka asks if Papa has brought her here because he is dying. She immediately thinks about how she would change her life if she found out her father was terminally ill. Papa doesn’t answer directly, but instead asks if Ka remembers the description of how dead people are judged in The Book of the Dead. The person’s heart is placed on a scale, and if it’s too heavy they cannot enter the next world. He then says: “I don’t deserve a statue.” He recalls that when they would go to the Brooklyn Museum during Ka’s childhood, she would always notice the pieces missing from the Ancient Egyptian statues. He says he is like those statues, and Ka laughs at the idea that he is comparing himself to an Ancient Egyptian.

Ka waves her arms when she laughs, and now Papa aggressively grabs her wrist, hurting her. When he sees her expression, he apologizes and says he didn’t mean to hurt her, adding: “I did not want to hurt anyone.” He then repeats that he doesn’t deserve a sculpture, saying: “Your father was the hunter, he was not the prey.” Ka asks what he means, and then suddenly realizes that his answer is going to explain why he and Anne have no friends and never discuss Haiti. She thinks this also has something to do with her mother’s religious devotion.

Papa says that he wasn’t sent to prison; rather, he worked in the prison, and it was one of the prisoners who gave him his scar. He says that he killed the man who gave it to him, along with many others. Ka wonders if Anne was also a perpetrator of violence, and then wonders if every time she goes to Mass, Anne is praying for Papa. She remembers a ritual from The Book of the Dead called “The Negative Confession,” in which the dead have a chance to claim that they only did good deeds.

Ka asks about Papa’s nightmares, and he replies that they are traumatic dreams about what he did to other people. She asks if Anne knows, and Papa says that she does. He told her the truth after Ka was born. Ka drives them back to the hotel, and when they get there Papa assures her that he is still her father, still Anne’s husband, and that he “would never do these things now.” After calling Officer Bo and Salinas to explain that Papa has been found, Ka calls her mother and asks how she can love him. Anne realizes that Papa has told Ka the truth, and tells her that Papa had been wanting to tell her for a very long time. 

Ka thinks about how similar her parents are, how they are a “society of two.” Anne tells her that she and Ka “save” Papa, and that meeting Anne made him want to stop being violent. Ka feels a loss of control similar to what happens when she is sculpting. She hangs up and decides she will need to continue the conversation later, perhaps in months or even years. The next morning, Ka tells Papa that she thinks they should go to lunch with Gabrielle and tell her in person that the sculpture is gone. 

Ka and Papa are silent during the drive to Gabrielle’s house. As they pull up, Papa says that now Ka understands why he and Anne never went back to Haiti. Gabrielle’s mother, Mrs. Fonteneau, answers the door and greets them warmly. The house is covered with Haitian paintings, along with a large portrait of Gabrielle. Mr. and Mrs. Fonteneau lead Ka and Papa out to the back terrace, where the table is laid. Mr. Fonteneau asks where Papa is from in Haiti; Papa always gives a different answer when people ask this, which Ka now realizes is to avoid people identifying him. When Papa greets Gabrielle, who is wearing a striking dress, he says: “You are one of the most splendid flowers of Haiti.”

During lunch, Mr. Fonteneau asks Papa how long he has spent away from Haiti; Papa replies that it’s been 37 years, and that he has not had “the opportunity” to go back. Mrs. Fonteneau says that they go often, effusively describing how much she loves being back. Ka reflects that, for Papa, returning would be like a nightmare. After lunch, Mr. and Mrs. Fonteneau show Papa around the garden, and Ka tells Gabrielle that the sculpture is gone. Gabrielle frowns and says that she’s “very disappointed,” as she wanted to give it to her father. She seems to suspect that Ka was never going to bring the sculpture in the first place.

Gabrielle curtly excuses herself, and Ka watches Mr. Fonteneau and Mrs. Fonteneau hand Papa a bag of lemongrass from the garden. She thinks about a chapter from The Book of the Dead that Papa would read to her to stop her being scared of monsters. She waves to Papa, indicating that it’s time to go. As he walks toward her, he rubs the scar on his face. She imagines that the last person Papa hurt may have foretold (or cursed) that for the rest of his life, Papa would hide or lie about his scar in shame.

Papa and Ka wave goodbye to Mr. Fonteneau and Mrs. Fonteneau, who may not have understood why they came in the first place. When Papa smiles, his scar almost disappears; as a child, Ka used to wish he would smile always. As they drive away, Ka feels full of dread and regret. She senses that Papa knows that “confessions do not lighten living hearts.” She had always imagined that the difficulties of Papa’s life lay in the fact that he’d moved somewhere so different from his homeland. However, now she realizes that the alien land of the US may have actually brought him relief. He sought refuge in the Ancient Egyptians as well as in Ka and Anne, who became “masks against his own face.”