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
When Patrice returns home, she finds her mother’s family camped outside with frayed canvas tents and lean-to shelters stained with mud. Her cousin, Gerald, is a jiisikid and has come to help the family find Vera. That night, Gerald flies for a long time, inhabited by a spirit. Eventually, he sees Vera, lying on her back, wearing a dress with a cloth across her throat. Gerald tells the family that he’s found Vera in the city, and he saw a child beside her.
Gerald is a jiisikid, a kind of seer, who is trying to locate Vera. When he finally finds her, the cloth he sees across her throat seems to suggest that she’s in some kind of trouble, that she can’t breathe freely, and that she may have given birth to a child, a development that will be significant for Patrice later.
Themes
The next day, at work, Patrice gets a note from Betty Pye, who has just come back after being off for a week. The note says that Betty’s cousin lives in the city and saw Vera and that Patrice should be on the lookout for more news. The next day, Patrice hitches a ride to the post office with Thomas, who sees her on the road while he’s driving with Wade. Patrice reads the note from Betty out loud to him. Patrice walks back from the post office, needing time to think. When she gets home, she sees Barnes’s car stuck in the mud. He is trying to push it out with Pokey behind the wheel.
As information about Vera trickles in, Patrice starts to plan how she’ll try and find her sister. Meanwhile, Barnes, who Patrice isn’t interested in, has come to her house uninvited, not for the first time, with hopes of talking with her. Barnes’s fixation on his own desires (he wants to talk to Patrice) at the expense of caring about what Patrice is going through (trying to find her missing sister) shows not just Barnes’s obliviousness, but hints at the erasure of women’s agency at the hands of men that will animate other parts of the novel, particularly Vera’s story. Barnes’s obliviousness is also juxtaposed against Thomas’s selfless, community-minded action of giving Patrice a ride simply because she needed one.
Themes
