Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Shadow of the Wind, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Duality and Repetition
Possessive and Obsessive Love
Fathers, Sons, and Masculinity
Reality and the Written Word
Coincidence and Determinism
Summary
Analysis
Daniel tells Bea to stay in the room and steals out to warn Carax. Fumero catches him in the foyer, and Daniel lies and says that Carax has run away. Fumero puts his gun in Daniel’s mouth and demands he tell the truth. Daniel says that Carax is in the crypt, although he can see Carax sneaking up behind Fumero as he speaks. Carax tackles Fumero and they tussle over the gun. Carax grabs Fumero’s knife and stabs his wrist into the wall. He tells Daniel to get Bea and leave quickly.
In their first face-to-face meeting, Daniel and Carax work together to pin Fumero to the wall. It’s important that their two narratives converge at the climactic moment that they must confront their shared enemy.
Themes
Just at that moment, Palacios enters the house and Fumero frees himself from the wall. Palacios wants to let Daniel leave, but Fumero grabs his gun and turns on Carax. Daniel jumps on Fumero, and Fumero shoots Daniel through the ribs. Dazed, Daniel sees Carax and Palacios bending over him and Bea running into the library. Fumero turns his gun on Bea but Laín Coubert, who has “taken [Carax’s] place,” attacks Fumero and throws him into the fountain, where the hand of the angel statue impales him through the chest.
Like Nuria, Daniel describes Laín Coubert as a separate entity from Carax, thus absolving the author from his more violent actions. Interestingly, a demonic figure – Coubert – and the angelic statue cooperate to finally kill Fumero, a fitting culmination to the pattern of devils and angels that crop up throughout the novel.
Themes
Daniel drifts into unconsciousness, hallucinating that he’s an old man with Bea and also that Mr. Sempere and Nuria are crying over his grave. Before he faints, he remembers his mother’s face with a clarity he hasn’t felt for many years, as if the memory “had suddenly fallen out of the pages of a book.”
Daniel equates his unusual clarity of memory to the experience of reading a book. This shows that for him, reading leads to intense emotional experiences, and that the preservation of important real-life memories is inherently linked to literature.
Themes
