Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Nickel Boys, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Trauma and Repression
Unity, Support, and Hope
History, Secrecy, and Racism
Civil Rights, Dignity, and Sacrifice
Power, Fear, and Upward Mobility
Summary
Analysis
There are four ways to get out of Nickel. First, a student can wait for his sentence to run out. Second, a court can intercede, but this is a rare occurrence, since it usually means a lawyer or family member has managed to bribe a judge. The third way out is to die, and most deaths are recorded as the result of “natural causes.” For instance, one boy died in a sweatbox, but Nickel claimed that he perished because of “natural causes.” Most dead students are buried in Boot Hill, but others are hidden because of the circumstances surrounding their deaths. For instance, many students are killed while on “unauthorized leave,” and these cases are never investigated. The fourth way out of Nickel is to escape. This, of course, is an incredibly risky thing to do, and the boys who are successful effectively disappear into unknown existences.
The chances of getting out of Nickel are rather slim. Because of this, it’s somewhat irrational for students to cultivate a sense of hope about their prospects, since the best way to leave Nickel is simply by making it to the end of one’s sentence without getting killed, and there’s little way for them to control whether that happens. And though a student might hope to graduate by earning enough merits, Whitehead has already made it clear that this systems is flawed at best, since students receive demerits for even the smallest infractions. What’s more, the students who manage to escape simply disappear, meaning that Nickel effectively erases them from history, thereby making it impossible for other students to draw hope from the story of a peer’s successful getaway plan.
Themes
Elwood believes there is yet another way to get out of Nickel. He thinks of it after his grandmother comes to see him shortly after New Year’s. He has spent his time obediently following the rules, deriving a sense of progress from this dutifulness. However, this sense of progress has enabled him to trick himself into believing that he has made progress. In reality, though, he has let the institution defeat him, turning him into someone who’s too exhausted to resist oppression. Meanwhile, his grandmother has been ill, forcing her to skip previous opportunities to visit. Now, though, she is finally here, but her frailty forces Elwood to recognize for the first time that she might not be alive when he gets out of Nickel.
Whitehead waits to reveal Elwood’s idea regarding how to get out of Nickel. Instead, he focuses on the way the boy thinks about his time at the school, suggesting that Elwood’s determination to follow the rules is more or less futile. By doing the best he can to avoid trouble, Elwood feels a false sense of hope, as if he’s working toward something. Unfortunately, though, all he’s doing is submitting to abusive authority figures like Spencer, who make him feel like submission is the only way out of Nickel—even though there’s actually no guarantee that he’ll get out at all.
Themes
Harriet delivers bad news about Elwood’s prospects of getting out of Nickel. The lawyer she hired, she tells him, has fled town with all of the family’s money. Harriet apologizes for failing Elwood, but he insists that he’s all right, explaining that he just rose to the level of Explorer. In the aftermath of this visit, though, he considers the various ways out of Nickel, deciding once and for all that there is, in fact, a fifth way, which is to take down Nickel itself.
Rather than letting Harriet’s news about the lawyer discourage him, Elwood decides to fight back against Nickel. He most likely decides this because he sees that following the rules has done little to actually help his situation. As a result, he once again reveals his belief in the value of standing up for what one believes in—not just for his own benefit, but for the benefit of others as well.
Themes
