Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in When Will There Be Good News?, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Trauma, Survival, and Reckoning with the Past
Appearances vs. Reality
Lies and Deceptions
Family
Summary
Analysis
Joanna has various poems and nursery rhymes running through her mind, along with, “Run, Joanna, run.” But she can’t run because she’s tethered by a rope. She had always expected to find herself in a dark place like this again.
This chapter, whose French title is “the rules of the game,” brings full circle Joanna’s “no rules” philosophy. The only rule for her is love—protection of those she loves—at any cost, and her behavior in captivity shows what that love looks like in action. It’s a position she’s been expecting for a long time.
Themes
When the men come, they rarely speak to her and don’t seem to care if Joanna sees their faces. She talks to them, anyway, calling them Peter and John, addressing them as such whenever possible. She figures they’re going to kill her, but she decides she’ll make it as difficult as possible for them. They bring her and the baby food, diapers, and toys. She and the baby were both groggy for the first day because the men had injected a sedative into both of them. Joanna had prepared the vein for them after they held a knife to the baby’s throat. They’d walked into the bedroom while Joanna was changing after work.
The men who are holding Joanna captive seem to expect that they’re going to kill her, and Joanna knows it, so she tries to humanize both them and herself as much as possible. Finally the circumstances of the kidnapping become clearer—it happened right after Reggie said a fateful goodbye to Joanna and the baby on the Hunters’ porch a few days ago, proving her foreboding correct.
Themes
The house is unheated and cold, and Joanna can see nothing but barren fields all around. On the second day, Peter gives Joanna a piece of paper and tells her to write a note to Neil, saying that she and the baby will die if Neil doesn’t do as he’s told. She wonders what Neil did to cause this and what he’s doing to end it.
Joanna doesn’t seem to have had direct connections with Neil’s shady business associates, and her disappearance apparently didn’t have to do with Andrew Decker after all. It’s not clear how well she knows Neil after all; they seem to have lived rather separate lives.
Themes
Joanna had become a doctor because she wanted to help and heal people. She’d been attracted to Neil because he seemed whole, not needing any healing. He was part of the fake life she’d spent thirty years working to create, but after the baby was born, her life became real.
Joanna feels driven to heal the broken, and Neil hadn’t seemed to need her help. With him Joanna tried to recreate the family she’d lost, and the baby had finally made that possible. At the same time, her love for the baby made Joanna more vulnerable.
Themes
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Peter explains to Joanna that “the guy we’re working for” wants Neil to sign over his business, and Joanna and the baby are the price of not doing so. Joanna objects that this is coercion, which will never stand up in court. Peter just laughs and says, “You’re not in your world now, Doctor.” So she writes the note as he says.
Neil has gotten in over his head, at the risk of Joanna’s and the baby’s lives. Joanna gives the appearance here of being the obedient girl who hid in the wheat field 30 years ago—an appearance that’s about to be overturned.
Themes
Early on Saturday, John wakes Joanna and tells her to write another note. She writes, “Please help us. We don’t want to die.” Later, when John returns, Joanna jams the pen into his eye as far as it will go. He’s dead. When Peter comes in, he finds Joanna cradling John’s body. Joanna tells him that something is wrong with John, and as he crouches down to look, she slams her hand into Peter’s windpipe. She grabs the knife from his ankle sheath and cuts through the rope that’s tethering her. Then she sticks the knife into both of his carotid arteries. The baby wakes up, and she recites a nursery rhyme for him.
The next day, Joanna stabs both her captors brutally to death. It’s apparent that she’s been thinking about and planning this for a while. The contrast between Joanna’s carefully written ransom note and the grisly deaths of the two men is the climactic demonstration of the contrast between outward appearances and inner reality in Joanna’s life. The contrast is heightened still more when she sings a soothing song to the baby, apparently not hesitating at all as she switches gears between brutality and maternal softness. Joanna has abided by the “rules of the game” by doing what she believed she had to do to save the baby’s life.
Themes
