Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Night Watchman, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Power, Solidarity, and Community Action
Oppression and Supposed Good Intentions
Humor and Pain
Sex, Violence, and Gender
Agency and Exploitation
Summary
Analysis
After the first snow, Patrice thinks that she’ll have to wait until spring to test Betty Pye’s information. She had decided on Wood Mountain because he is less “sticky” than Barnes. Patrice thinks of different possibilities and thinks maybe she and Wood Mountain could use the old, abandoned cabin up the hill from her house, the one Vera had worked on, hoping it might one day become her house. Patrice puts on long underwear, padded overalls, and two layers of wool socks and heads up the hill with a pair of snowshoes Zhaanat had made her. She sets snares leading up to Vera’s cabin. When she gets there, she thinks of Vera and wonders how she could have thought of using the cabin with Wood Mountain for “crude love.”
Patrice shows again how much she values her agency and independence, wanting to have sex but not wanting the guy she chooses to latch onto her. Her love for her sister outweighs everything else, though, which is why Vera’s old cabin no longer seems like a suitable place for a romantic rendezvous with Wood Mountain.
Themes
Patrice falls suddenly and then sits in the leaves. She takes off her snow shoes and then smells the unmistakable scent of a bear. She knows the bear is hibernating. She drifts off. When she wakes up, she feels so much stronger than before. And fearless.
Patrice has a potentially dangerous encounter with a bear, but when she emerges unscathed, she feels free, strong, powerful, and fearless, feelings that reassert how important her independence and agency are because they’re the things that make her feel truly alive.
Themes
