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Chapter Twenty-One
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in A Complicated Kindness, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Religion and Dogma
Family and Home
Community and Coming of Age
Narrative and Storytelling
Christian Salvation vs. Earthly Joy
Summary
Analysis
Nomi remembers the days when Tash was paid to hang out with their grandmother so she didn’t “get wasted on vanilla, burn down her apartment, get kicked out and have to live with us.” Tash said that their grandmother was going insane because of The Mouth. Nomi often kept Tash company outside the apartment, and Tash gave her dimes for the Trampoline House. One day, Tash told her that whenever she thought about boys she always sneezed, and she was terrified that Trudie and Ray are going to discover what the sneezes mean.
Nomi’s grandmother’s precarious mental state contrasts with Trudie’s highly positive memories of her Mennonite childhood. This gap shows how memory can reflect one’s ideal of family, rather than one’s actual familial circumstances. Meanwhile, Tash’s comment about The Mouth shows how his overbearing authority can be damaging even to very devout community members.
Themes
In the present day, Travis teaches Nomi how to walk properly; she has to “roll and bob more” and give off a “druggy” vibe. They walk to the museum village, where it starts to rain, and sit inside the barn to keep dry. Then they go outside and practice walking on top of the fence. Nomi tells Travis she loves being with him, and Travis responds that she smells nice. They walk to Travis’s house and listen to Lou Reed in the basement. They fall asleep and wake up when Travis’s mother says that he has to do his chores and Nomi has to go home. On Nomi’s way home, she runs into her neighbor, who is furious because her young son has eaten her bath salts. The neighbor tells Nomi that when she has kids, she’ll “know true misery.”
Just as Travis redesigns Nomi’s signature, he now instructs her to walk a different way. Rather than acknowledging any of Nomi’s unique qualities, he concentrates on transforming her into a cooler, trendier person. In a way, Travis’s inability to accept people the way they are mirrors The Mouth’s insistence that people conform completely to Mennonite norms, even if that means suppressing individuality. This is a stark contrast to Nomi herself, as she is highly empathetic and accepting of people’s quirks and faults.
Themes
When Nomi gets home, Ray says that the school has called to tell him that she’s skipping too much class to graduate high school. She goes to her bedroom and watches tourists passing through in RVs. Travis has a job now pretending to be a shepherd at the museum and erasing the profanities tourist kids write on the schoolhouse blackboard. One day he writes “OBEY” on the blackboard as a joke, but The Mouth approves of it. Sometimes he pretends to be married to a girl named Adeline, who once beat up another girl at school for stealing her look. Travis aspires to set up a “shunning booth” for the American tourists.
Travis’s pioneer persona contrasts with his actual love for pop culture, represented by the “OBEY” slogan. Similarly, Adeline’s virtuous, motherly character contrasts with her modern, aggressive personality. This is a humorous passage illustrating the ridiculousness of the museum village, but more broadly shows how rigid societies force people to adopt personae that are obviously at odds with their actual identities.
Themes
Ray leaves and Nomi goes downstairs, where she finds a piece of paper on which Ray has listed the necessary qualifications of an elder. She wonders if things would be different with Ray in charge. On the other side of the paper is a chart titled “Satan Cast Down,” which explains the Rapture through a series of arrows and categories like “saved dead, unsaved dead, millennium, bottomless pit, lake of fire.” Nomi can’t make sense of the chart, so she goes back upstairs.
The church chart has reduced the lyrical, complex storytelling of the Bible to an utterly incomprehensible mess of lines and arrows. This humorous moment corresponds to Mr. Quiring’s insistence that his class write reductive, ultimately meaningless stories.
Themes
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After a while, Nomi puts on a halter top and a lot of makeup. She leaves a note for Ray promising to go to school and asking a question about Canadian history because he loves to answer them. She walks to the museum and is annoyed to see Travis and Adeline happily sharing a joint. Nomi and Travis go for a walk, and she makes him promise he’s not “having some weird thing” with Adeline. Then she asks if he’s really going to Montreal; Travis says he’s not sure, because he doesn’t have enough money and his parents won’t like it. They hug before he returns to his job.
Travis wants to move to Montreal, but he’s also unable to make a decision without his parents’ input. Meanwhile, Nomi has (albeit reluctantly) become much more independent than him, essentially living her life free of any parental input. That she feels dependent on him to leave town, then, reflects her lack of self-confidence, rather than any actual competence on Travis’s part.
Themes
Nomi goes to the general store to buy some candy. The manager remarks that Nomi hasn’t been to church lately. Nomi knows the manager is genuinely worried she’s going to hell, and she feels bad for her. The manager gently suggests that Nomi read the Gospels, and Nomi thanks her. As Nomi leaving, the manager asks if she can pray for her; Nomi says yes and thanks her again. She walks to the pits and wades into the water with all her clothes on, only leaving when she hears other teenagers arriving.
The manager’s genuine concern for Nomi’s salvation contrasts with The Mouth’s use of dogma to exert control over his congregants. Meanwhile, even though Nomi no longer shares this woman’s ideals, she accepts her concern graciously. This moment of mutual tolerance and respect represents the positive aspects of a community that Nomi often sees as irremediably flawed.
Themes
Nomi recalls one of her favorite childhood books. There were no words, only colors. The first page was black, to symbolize her heart “without Jesus.” The second was red, showing Jesus’s blood washing over the Mennonites and saving them. The third was white, representing her “new clean heart.” Nomi’s Sunday school teacher read this book with the children regularly. They also did other activities like acting out Bible stories on a felt board, but no one was allowed to “do voices for the characters because it always ended in Jesus leaping from the cross and drop-kicking the bad guys.” One day at home, Nomi scratched herself to see what color her blood was, and she was disturbed to find it didn’t match the color of Jesus’s blood in the book. Later, Tash discovered the book covered in bloody fingerprints and got angry when Nomi wouldn’t admit what she’d done.
Just like the chart of Satan’s fall, the picture book and Sunday school rituals rob Biblical stories of their full, complex meanings. Even though the children’s transformation of Jesus into a superhero is somewhat irreverent, it’s an attempt to participate fully in these stories, just as Nomi’s own narrative is an attempt to view her life outside the dogma imposed by the church. Ultimately, the church establishment represses the most meaningful engagement with biblical lore, just as it prevents serious personal introspection by enforcing a single accepted narrative.
Themes
