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
A cheerful Australian doctor tells Jackson Brodie how much blood they’d had to transfuse into him to save his life. A registrar who looks like Harry Potter explains that he’s also had “a bit of a dunt to the head.” Later, a nurse informs him that his name is Andrew Decker, according to the wallet that had been found in his pocket. Jackson is skeptical, but he can’t remember anything else about himself or the accident, so he accepts it. A policewoman questions him about the license, apparently expired, but Jackson can’t tell her anything. He sleeps and wakes repeatedly, feeling like “a blank sheet of paper, a clock without hands.”
Jackson’s situation is even more vulnerable than he realizes—he’s not only been misidentified, but somehow, implausibly, Andrew Decker’s wallet had been placed in his pocket. This is one of several mysteries that remains unresolved in the story, one with potentially alarming consequences for Jackson. And because Jackson relies on his investigative smarts both for a living and for making sense of his world, his head injury puts him in a particularly shaky spot—symbolic of the upheaval in his life overall.
Themes
