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Chapter 9
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Wandering Stars, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Colonization, Racism, and Institutional Violence
Intergenerational Trauma
Addiction
Survival vs. Resilience
Identity and Cultural Erasure
Summary
Analysis
The morning before the morning Charles robs the store, he sits down and writes. He doesn’t know it will be the last time he writes anything. He isn’t sure what he’s writing but knows that he wants to capture connected points about his relatives and ancestors. Most days, he takes laudanum, and sometimes it makes him think about the long-ago past. He hopes that with Opal—and maybe, someday, with their children—he’ll be able to find calm, love, and peace, or a place where they can hear water running and birds singing in the morning.
Charles’s manuscript, no matter how much it might be affected by his laudanum-induced hazes, becomes the main source through which later generations will learn about their ancestors. Without that record, later generations of the family may not be aware of, say, Jude’s survival of the Sand Creek Massacre or Charles’s experiences of abuse at the Carlisle school and how those events impacted them (those in the future generations). This passage, then, highlights the importance and value of documenting and preserving historical records, especially when those records reveal facts that the dominant narratives seek to obscure or erase.
Themes
