The Lightning Thief

by

Rick Riordan

Teachers and parents! Our Teacher Edition on The Lightning Thief makes teaching easy.
Themes and Colors
Identity, Heroism, and Normalcy Theme Icon
Family Theme Icon
Friendship and Belonging Theme Icon
Godliness vs. Humanity Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Lightning Thief, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.

Identity, Heroism, and Normalcy

The Lightning Thief introduces readers to 12-year-old Percy Jackson. Percy is a troubled kid—he wants to be good and do well in school, but he struggles with dyslexia and ADHD, and he has a knack for getting into major trouble at every opportunity. Percy’s sixth-grade year is shaping up to be much the same as previous years—except that once summer vacation starts, Percy discovers why he has such a hard time in school: he’s…

read analysis of Identity, Heroism, and Normalcy

Family

Family is a somewhat difficult subject for Percy and his demigod friends, as well as for the actual gods in the story. Every character, no matter how divine or mortal they might be, has a difficult relationship with at least one family member: Percy hates his stepdad, Smelly Gabe, and he resents his father at times; his friend Annabeth has a rocky relationship with her dad and stepmom; and the sibling relationships between the…

read analysis of Family

Friendship and Belonging

Making friends isn’t something that comes easily to Percy. Having changed schools every year for the last several years, it’s been difficult for him to make any lasting friends—especially when he appears to be such a troublemaker at school, and therefore a liability to be around anyway. This begins to change at the beginning of the school year when Percy meets Grover, a kind and caring worrywart—who later, Percy discovers, is a satyr

read analysis of Friendship and Belonging
Get the entire The Lightning Thief LitChart as a printable PDF.
The Lightning Thief PDF

Godliness vs. Humanity

Though The Lightning Thief by its very nature concerns gods, Riordan nevertheless goes to great lengths to humanize (and add a humorous aspect to) every god, goddess, and mythical being in the novel. From Medusa’s roadside fast food restaurant and sculpture garden to Dionysus’s obvious displeasure at being forced to run Camp Half-Blood and remain sober, all the gods and monsters read as distinctly human—just with magical abilities and a great deal of…

read analysis of Godliness vs. Humanity