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Chapter 30
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 worries about Orvil, whom Lony thinks looks tired beyond his years. Lony first felt a hint of “freedom” the night that Will the dog went missing. Searching through the streets, Lony had felt a sense of buoyancy. In an attempt to discover that feeling again, Lony leaves his phone at home one day and runs away, headed for the ocean, which he’s never seen in person before. He tells a stranger he’s looking for his grandmother, and that person offers to give him a ride to the ocean. When they arrive, Lony runs off while the person shouts after him. On the beach, Lony finds an unoccupied tent and falls asleep inside it.
Lony’s desire to find freedom foreshadows the larger decision that he will make toward the end of the novel. Lony understands his forays into running away as attempts to find freedom. According to Lony, he doesn’t seem to be running away from home as much as he’s running toward something that he can’t find in his house or his family. He repeatedly leaves home, then, to try and move closer and closer to that feeling of freedom that has been evading him.
Themes
