The Dew Breaker

by

Edwidge Danticat

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Themes and Colors
Grief, Memory, and Erasure Theme Icon
Victims vs. Perpetrators Theme Icon
Love, Hope, and Redemption Theme Icon
Violence vs. Care Theme Icon
Diaspora, Interconnection, and Haunting Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Dew Breaker, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Victims vs. Perpetrators Theme Icon

The Dew Breaker explores how life under a dictatorship and its aftermath unsettles clear distinctions between victims and perpetrators. While the book at no point suggests that perpetrators of violence should be excused for their actions, it also highlights how the Haitian Duvalier regime compelled many people to commit violence who might not otherwise have done so. Furthermore, it shows how the regime forced people to make difficult or impossible choices, which often placed them in the role of both victim and perpetrator. Instead of suggesting that the regime made personal ethics irrelevant or impossible, it highlights the necessity of critically reflecting on the ethical decisions people make in the highly complicated context of a dictatorship.

Papa was one of the many people tasked with enacting state violence on the civilian population. Yet after fleeing Haiti and making a new life in the U.S., he not only covers up his role as a perpetrator, but in fact pretends that he was a victim of the regime. Clearly, this doubles down on his already horrifying crimes. For his daughter, Ka, realizing that her father was not the victim she had always thought but in fact a perpetrator of violence is deeply disturbing and effectively turns her world upside down.

Over the course of the book, the details about Papa’s past life working for the regime emerge, inviting the question of whether he was also a victim as well as a perpetrator. After revealing that he was “the hunter… not the prey,” Papa tells Ka: “I did not want to hurt anyone.” This seems plausible, as the regime placed a great deal of pressure on people to hurt others (often under the threat of death); moreover, after leaving Haiti Papa commits no further violence. Although on one hand Papa is explaining that he would never have tortured and killed people if it hadn’t been for the pressure of the state, he also seems to still be in denial about the fact that he did commit evil. As other parts of the book show, while the dictatorship placed people into extremely difficult ethical situations, everyone has the choice not to comply with the pressure to enact harm, though this often means risking death.

Another way in which the regime pressured people to become complicit in violence emerges through Rézia’s story about her childhood. In the U.S., Rézia tells her friends that back in Haiti she was raised by her aunt, who ran a brothel. One night a man in uniform raped Rézia, who was still a child, having demanded access to Rézia from her aunt under threat of death. Again, although this does not excuse the actions of Rézia’s aunt, it highlights how life under the dictatorship placed normal people into extremely difficult situations. Rézia’s aunt was undoubtedly complicit in violence by allowing the man access to the child under her care, yet was also a victim of the murderous violence the regime, which prevented her from protecting Rézia in the way she otherwise would have.

The book also explores how the binary of victim and perpetrator becomes mixed up through the interconnection of friends, family, and community members who have different relationships to state violence. Perhaps the most obvious example is Anne, who unwittingly marries the man (Papa) who killed her brother, the preacher, but remains married to him and helps keep his secret after learning the truth. Anne is clearly a victim of the violence that took the life of her brother, yet she is perhaps also complicit in choosing to remain married to Papa.

Another example is Anne’s brother himself, the preacher whom Papa kills. Before this murder, the preacher’s wife is killed by the state, and he feels a that “He could never shake from his thoughts the notion that his wife’s death had been his fault.” In one sense the preacher’s wife’s death is absolutely not his fault. The preacher cannot be blamed for the fact that they live under a repressive dictatorship where his sermons are unreasonably branded as heretical. At the same time, it is understandable why he would feel guilt over the fact that his actions led state authorities to persecute his wife.

Overall, The Dew Breaker illustrates the many ways in which the victim versus perpetrator binary is complicated, but it is also careful not to use this to exonerate the perpetrators. The most important way in which the novel achieves this is through representing the stories of those who refused to be complicit in state violence, even if this meant facing death. For example, Freda fled because she refused to sing at the National Palace, a choice that would have endangered her life. While the threat of death is (understandably) enough to make many people feel that they are forced to become complicit in violence, Freda took a stand: “I made a choice that I’d rather stop singing altogether than sing for the type of people who’d killed my father.” Freda’s use of the word “choice” serves as reminder that, while the dictatorship blurred the boundaries of victims and perpetrators, this does not mean that the choices of those living under it should escape ethical scrutiny. Danticat ultimately argues, then, that although the line between victims and perpetrators of violence is often a blurry one in particularly dire circumstances, the individual always has some level of agency in deciding which side of this binary they fall toward.

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Victims vs. Perpetrators ThemeTracker

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Victims vs. Perpetrators Quotes in The Dew Breaker

Below you will find the important quotes in The Dew Breaker related to the theme of Victims vs. Perpetrators.
The Book of the Dead Quotes

My father has never liked having his picture taken. We have only a few of him at home, some awkward shots at my different school graduations, with him standing between my mother and me, his hand covering his scar. I had hoped to take some pictures of him on this trip, but he hadn't let me. At one of the rest stops I bought a disposable camera and pointed it at him anyway. As usual, he protested, covering his face with both hands like a little boy protecting his cheeks from a slap. He didn't want any more pictures taken of him for the rest of his life, he said, he was feeling too ugly.

Related Characters: Ka Bienaimé (speaker), Papa , Anne Bienaimé/Landlady
Related Symbols: Papa’s Scar
Page Number: 5
Explanation and Analysis:

I’d used a piece of mahogany that was naturally flawed, with a few superficial cracks along what was now the back. I’d thought these cracks beautiful and had made no effort to sand or polish them away, as they seemed like the wood's own scars, like the one my father had on his face. But I was also a little worried about the cracks. Would they seem amateurish and unintentional, like a mistake? Could the wood come apart with simple movements or with age? Would the client be satisfied?

Related Characters: Ka Bienaimé (speaker), Papa
Related Symbols: Papa’s Scar, The Sculpture
Page Number: 7
Explanation and Analysis:
The Book of Miracles Quotes

Besides, soon after her husband had opened his barbershop, he’d discovered that since he'd lost eighty pounds, changed his name, and given as his place of birth a village deep in the mountains of Leogane, no one asked about him anymore, thinking he was just a peasant who'd made good in New York. He hadn't been a famous “dew breaker,” or torturer, anyway, just one of hundreds who had done their jobs so well that their victims were never able to speak of them again.

Related Characters: Papa , Anne Bienaimé/Landlady
Page Number: 76-77
Explanation and Analysis:

What if it were Constant? What would she do? Would she spit in his face or embrace him, acknowledging a kinship of shame and guilt that she'd inherited by marrying her husband? How would she even know whether Constant felt any guilt or shame? What if he'd come to this Mass to flaunt his freedom? To taunt those who'd been affected by his crimes? What if he didn't even see it that way? What if he considered himself innocent? Innocent enough to go anywhere he pleased? What right did she have to judge him? As a devout Catholic and the wife of a man like her husband, she didn't have the same freedom to condemn as her daughter did.

Related Characters: Ka Bienaimé, Papa , Anne Bienaimé/Landlady, Emmanuel Constant
Page Number: 81
Explanation and Analysis:
Night Talkers Quotes

In spite of his huge muscles and oversized tattoos, Claude seemed oddly defenseless, like a refugee lost at sea, or a child looking for his parents in a supermarket aisle. Or maybe that’s just how Dany wanted to see him, to make him seem more normal, less frightening.

Related Characters: Dany , Claude
Page Number: 118
Explanation and Analysis:
Monkey Tails: February 7, 1986 / February 7, 2004 Quotes

I was twelve years old and, according to my mother, three months before my birth I had lost my father to something my mother would only vaguely describe as “political,” making me part of a generation of mostly fatherless boys, though some of our fathers were still living, even if somewhere else—in the provinces in another country, or across the ally not acknowledging us. A great many of our fathers had also died in the dictatorship’s prisons, and others had abandoned us altogether to serve the regime.

Related Characters: Michel (speaker), Michel’s Mother, Monsieur Christophe
Page Number: 141
Explanation and Analysis:
The Dew Breaker (Circa 1967) Quotes

He’d wound you, then try to soothe you with words, then he’d wound you again. He thought he was God.

Related Characters: Papa
Page Number: 199
Explanation and Analysis:

But he could never shake from his thoughts the notion that his wife’s death had been his fault, that she’d been killed to punish him for the things he said on his radio program or from the pulpit of his church.

Related Characters: The Preacher
Page Number: 207
Explanation and Analysis:

Léon, the shoeshine man, wiped a tear from his eye, remembering his own son who was one of those men who roamed the night in denim uniforms and carried people away to their deaths. His son might have been one of those he’d emptied the slop jars on and who had shot in his direction in return, for a good Volunteer, it was said, should be able to kill his mother and father for the regime.

Even though Léon hated what his son did, he still had to let his boy come home now and then for the boy’s mother's sake and still had to acknowledge that maybe it was because of his boy that he'd not yet been arrested.

Related Characters: Léon
Page Number: 208-209
Explanation and Analysis:

He had been counting on a quick death, not one where he would disappear in stages of prolonged suffering interrupted by a few seconds of relief. He had never thought he’d have reason to hope that maybe his life might be spared. He hadn’t expected the kindness of his cellmates, men of different skin tones and social classes all thrown together in this living hell and helping one another survive it.

Related Characters: The Preacher
Page Number: 224-225
Explanation and Analysis:

Maybe be shouldn’t have preached those “sermons to the beast,” as he liked to think of them. But someone needed to stir the flock out of their stupor, the comfort that religion allowed them, that it was okay to have wretched lives here on earth so long as Heaven was glowing ahead. Maybe his death would do just that, move his people to revolt, to demand justice for themselves while requesting it for him. Or maybe his death would have no relevance at all. He would simply join a long list of martyrs and his name would vanish from his countrymen's lips as soon as his body was placed in the ground.

Related Characters: The Preacher
Page Number: 227
Explanation and Analysis:

And yet he had not been completely defeated. The wound on the fat man’s face wasn’t what he had hoped, he hadn’t blinded him or removed some of his teeth, but at least he’d left a mark on him, a brand that he would carry the rest of his life. Every time he looked in the mirror, he would have to confront this mark and remember him. Whenever people asked what happened to his face, he would have to tell a lie, a lie that would further remind him of the truth.

Related Characters: Papa , The Preacher
Related Symbols: Papa’s Scar
Page Number: 227-228
Explanation and Analysis: