Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Dry, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Human Cost of Climate Change
Justice
Urban vs. Rural
Friendship
Summary
Analysis
Falk walks around Kiewarra, surprised at how quickly people have changed their minds and accepted him. He goes to the rock tree to remember Ellie, then he carves her initials into the secret crevasse. He reaches deep into the crevasse and pulls out a purple backpack. Inside the rucksack are some clothes, some money, and the ID of a girl who looks similar to Ellie but has a different name. At the very bottom of the backpack is Ellie’s diary.
Falk’s quick acceptance in Kiewarra is perhaps darkly humorous, showing how people who were once willing to threaten his life now treat him politely, as if nothing happened. Solving the Hadler murder case and confronting the past seems to give Falk the insight (and perhaps also the courage) to also check his and Ellie’s their old hiding spot in the rock-tree and find out what really happened to her.
Themes
Ellie’s diary confirms that Deacon got drunk and abused her, sometimes calling her by her mother’s name while he did it. She began to drink and spend more time with friends to get out of the house. She stopped drinking the day she decided she had to run. When Falk discovered the crevasse in the rock tree, it seemed like a sign, because it gave her a good place to hide her things. She then booked a room at a motel out of town under the name Falk. The diary confirms the date of Ellie’s planned stay. Then Ellie wrote, “If my dad finds out, he will kill me.”
The information in Ellie’s diary confirms what Falk and others already knew about Deacon abusing Ellie. Still, the diary is important because, regardless of whether Falk decides to share it with the world, it helps him finally make peace with his guilty feelings about Ellie’s death (since Falk has wondered for so many years if he himself was partly at fault for giving Luke an alibi).
Themes
In a flashback to 20 years ago, after Ellie wrote her last diary entry, Deacon and Dow realize Ellie is gone and decide to go looking for her. They find Ellie by the river and confront her, realizing she is planning to flee. Deacon slaps her, then he holds her in the river to drown her. He and Dow find stones to weigh her down and then happen to notice the note with Falk’s name in Ellie’s pocket, so they plant the note in Ellie’s room. Deacon promises his farm to Dow to ensure his cooperation.
Even though Deacon has long seemed like the most likely candidate for killing Ellie, the final passage is still shocking, showing the sort of violence that remained mostly hidden beneath the surface in Kiewarra. This passage puts all of Deacon and Dow’s behavior throughout the book into a new context, showing how their intense hatred of Falk was really just a way to redirect suspicion away from themselves—and perhaps even a way for them to try to repress their own feelings of guilt.
Themes
In the present, Falk closes Ellie’s diary, thinking about her line “If my dad finds out, he will kill me.” The sun is setting, but Falk knows the way back to Kiewarra.
While the novel concludes on a deliberately uncertain note regarding Falk’s future, his thoughts about the line, “If my dad finds out, he will kill me,” seem to suggest that he finally knows the truth about Ellie’s fate and might even have the evidence to convince others, if he chooses.
Themes
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