Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Westing Game, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Solidarity vs. Individualism
Capitalism, Greed, and Inheritance
Prejudice and Bigotry
Mystery and Intrigue
Summary
Analysis
Though the sun sets in the west, the newly-constructed Sunset Towers apartment complex, a glassy, solitary, and magnificent five-story building on the shore of Lake Michigan, faces east. One summer day—the Fourth of July—a sixty-two-year-old delivery boy rides around town slipping flyers under the doors of a group of “chosen” tenants-to-be. The letters are signed from a man named Barney Northrup—but no one receiving these letters is aware that Barney Northrup does not exist. The six letters describe the prospect of living in Sunset Towers as an unmissable opportunity and a “once-in-a-lifetime offer”—and advertise the fact that the building has space for a medical office, a coffee, shop, and a top-floor restaurant.
The novel’s first pages set up the theme of mystery and intrigue by immediately tipping readers off to the fact that things are not exactly as they seem to be. Sunset Towers faces the wrong direction, the local delivery boy is not a boy, and the realtor Barney Northrup does not exist. By establishing early on that no clue in this mystery can be fully trusted, Raskin urges her readers to constantly look deeper for the answers—just as her characters will need to plumb the depths of their own souls and one another’s in order to play the Westing game.
Themes
All six recipients of the letters make appointments with the man called Barney Northrup to see the apartments. Barney is a practiced salesman who knows how to appeal to each of his six clients. He highlights the luxurious chandeliers as he leads Grace Windsor Wexler and her husband, Jake, around a unit, which he tells them is the last available (although they are his first appointment of the day). He speaks about the affordability and practicality of the place as he shows Sydelle Pulaski, an aging secretary, her unit.
Barney Northrup misleads the future tenants of Sunset Towers as he shows them their future dwellings. This demonstrates that he is desperate to rent these apartments—a fact that Raskin will unpack later on. For now, the reason these specific people need to live in the building is a mystery—just as each of the tenants are a mystery both to the reader and to one another.
Themes
In just one day, Barney Northrup manages to rent all of the apartments in Sunset Towers. Jake Wexler, a podiatrist, takes the medical office, the Theodorakis family takes the coffee shop, and the Hoo family takes the restaurant upstairs. The other “specially selected” tenants consist of a dressmaker, a secretary, an inventor, and a judge. Hidden amongst the tenants are a bookie, a burglar, a bomber, and a mistake. Barney Northrup has rented one apartment to the wrong person.
By reducing the characters that she is about to introduce to one-word stereotypes or caricatures, Raskin purposefully urges her readers to challenge such reductivism and look deeper into who each tenant actually is. No single word can contain the multitudes of a person, and as the novel unfolds, Raskin plans to explore how someone can hold multiple identities, wants, and needs within themselves at once.
Themes
