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Chapter 16
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
Lony sits by the rosebushes out front of the house, cutting himself with a knife and then burying drops of his blood in the dirt next to a rubber band ball that he made. He doesn’t think he cuts himself for the same reasons that he’s heard that other people do. Instead, he thinks, he hopes that the ritual will help him get a superpower that will help him fight his feelings of powerlessness. He’s made a list of superpowers that a Native superhero might have, including “Can Fly (because of feathers),” “Has Thunder/Rain Control (because rain dancing?),” and “Superblood (released by cutting self?).” He thinks that Orvil has seemed mad about being Native recently. After he buries his blood, Lony feels an earthquake starting. Orvil yells from inside, and when Lony finds him, he sees Orvil holding his ponytail, which he’s just cut off.
Lony seems to desperately want to connect to Native culture but also seems lost about how to do so. The fact that he tries to forge that connection by cutting himself suggests that his feelings of disconnection from Native culture have led to feelings of alienation. He tells himself that he’s not cutting himself for the reasons others do—for instance, out of a desire to quell profound emotional distress—but Lony also seems to be an unreliable narrator and in distress himself. More than anything, Lony seems desperate to believe in something, and he hasn’t been able to find that, the novel argues, due to the systematic erasure of Native culture. As a result, Lony has been raised without feeling particularly connected to that culture.
Themes
