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Chapter 12
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
Orvil Red Feather looks up stories of other kids who have survived shootings on the internet. Reading those accounts and watching kids talk in videos makes Orvil feel seen. Orvil then looks into the history of school shootings in the U.S. and finds that the first one seems to have been perpetrated by a group of Lenape warriors in 1764. There’s no record of why they did it, but after they did, the Pennsylvania legislature reinstituted a bounty for scalps of Native people, and Orvil wonders if that fact alone might point to a possible motive. Orvil wants to feel normal, like how he felt before the shooting and before the hospital. Things became especially serious then because a stray bullet hit Orvil, leaving a wound in the shape of a star.
While Orvil copes with a profoundly traumatic event—being shot during a shooting—he notably doesn’t turn to anyone in his life for help. Instead, he turns to the internet, where there is no shortage of content for, and by, people who have survived similar shootings. That fact provides the backdrop for the 2018 portion of the novel, establishing the fact that U.S. culture is beset by widespread violence. Orvil also learns a fact about Native history from the internet, signaling again that Orvil may not be connected to adults in his life who he might be able to talk to about Native culture or what he’s going through.
Themes
Orvil’s grandmother, Opal Viola, gives him a guitar she finds at an estate sale. The guitar sits in the corner of Orvil’s room until one day, when he is high on painkillers prescribed to treat pain from his gunshot wound, he picks it up. Orvil has learned that if he takes more painkillers than he’s supposed to, he feels even better. He then won’t dream about the shooting, which he’s been doing almost every night. Orvil worries that he’s predisposed to become addicted to the painkillers since there’s a long history of addiction in his family, including his mom, who was addicted to heroin. Orvil starts taking pills and watching TV, playing video games, and playing guitar. The pills help him feel more, he thinks, and feel “brave and confident.” He starts playing guitar more too, and he thinks that the guitar might help save him.
Themes
