Previous
Chapter 16
Themes and Colors
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in We Are Not Free, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Racism and World War II
The Japanese American characters in Traci Chee’s We Are Not Free follows 14 young Japanese Americans during World War II, as the U.S. government implements its internment policy. As part of this policy, anyone of Japanese ancestry was forcibly removed from their home and imprisoned in temporary detention centers. The policy, based on the false premise that Japanese immigrants and their descendants would betray the U.S. in World War II, upends the lives of the…
read analysis of Racism and World War II
Friendship and Community
We Are Not Free is a novel with 14 different narrators, including a chapter narrated in the plural (as “we”), and this emphasizes how it is a novel about a diverse yet deeply interconnected community. Family connections are important to many of these characters, but what becomes even more important in getting them through difficult times is friendship. The removal from their homes is traumatic for these Nisei teenagers, but the novel shows how the…
read analysis of Friendship and Community
Japanese American Identity
Traci Chee’s We Are Not Free explores what it means to be Japanese American, particularly in the wake of Pearl Harbor. Perhaps the character to explore this issue most directly is Tommy, who narrates one chapter in a series of poems that alternately look at both his American side and his Japanese side. Tommy feels torn because he’s lived his whole life in the United States, while his Japanese immigrant parents want him to…
read analysis of Japanese American Identity
Get the entire We Are Not Free LitChart as a printable PDF.
"My students can't get enough of your charts and their results have gone through the roof." -Graham S.
Coming of Age
All of the characters in We Are Not Free are in their teens or early twenties, and this means that many of them move from childhood to adulthood at some point during the novel. In some cases, this is a big, dramatic event. Twitchy and Mas each come of age as a result of witnessing wartime deaths, with Mas scarred by a training incident and Twitchy haunted by the death of his friend Bill in…
read analysis of Coming of Age
