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Chapter 5
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
Charles Star sits in the shack at the back of an orchard where he lives and remembers events in a laudanum-induced haze. He remembers being sent to the Carlisle residential school after his mother became a missionary just a few weeks after his father went to a ceremony and never returned. Like Charles’s mother, Opal Bear Shield’s father also went off “to pray for other people.” Opal and Charles then went to the Carlisle school together. At the school, Charles endured beatings, starvation, and other forms of abuse as authorities attempted to erase his Native identity. He tried to run away repeatedly. Charles then has a vision of walking in an inaugural parade and killing the president, but he wakes up in the same shack at the back of the orchard, which is owned by the Haven family.
In this section, the novel begins to explore how future generations of Jude’s family inherit the trauma Jude experienced during the Sand Creek Massacre. Jude’s son, Charles, also seems to have inherited Jude’s propensity for addiction. The novel then shows that in addition to the trauma that Charles may have inherited from his father, he also experienced a staggering amount of trauma at Carlisle, showing how the trauma he has inherited is then compounded and added to by horrific events he experiences in his own life.
Themes
