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Chapter 66: Bran
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in A Game of Thrones, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Politics and Power
Climate Change and Collective Action
Gender and Power
Honor and Integrity
Identity
Summary
Analysis
Sansa grows despondent after Ned’s execution. She stays in bed in her room. At one point, she considers throwing herself out the window. One day, she hears footsteps making their way up the stairs. She’s sure it’s Ilyn, armed with her father’s sword, who has come to kill her. Instead, it’s Joffrey. He says that he wants Sansa to be present with him in court. Sansa argues with him. She says she did everything that was asked of her and asks why Joffrey didn’t show her father mercy. Joffrey tells Sansa not to argue with him. He says his mother told him it’s wrong for a man to hit his wife, so he commands a knight to hit Sansa. Joffrey says he showed Ned mercy by giving him a clean death instead of torturing him. Sansa tells Joffrey that she hates him.
Notably, Joffrey uses violence to control Sansa, similar to the violence that Viserys and Robert used to control Daenerys and Cersei, respectively. That pattern of gender-based violence utilized against women and girls by men in positions of power again shows that, contrary to what many characters in the novel contend, men are not more suited to power than women. Instead, the novel argues that patriarchal power is based on morally indefensible misogyny and gender-based violence directed against women.
Themes
In court, Sansa watches Joffrey hand out cruel sentence after cruel sentence. She recalls the songs of heroes she once believed in and thinks that there are no heroes. In real life, she thinks, the monsters win. Joffrey then takes Sansa to the parapets of the Red Keep. He says he wants to show her what happens to traitors. Sansa doesn’t want to go but knows that Joffrey will find a way to force her to go if she tries to resist. At the parapets, Joffrey shows Sansa Ned’s head affixed to a spike. He also shows her the head of Septa Mordane. He says that he’s reserving spots for Stannis, Renly, and Robb.
Sansa’s loss of faith in Joffrey represents a pivotal moment in her coming-of-age story. While she previously displayed a romantic view of the world in which people like Joffrey seemed like heroes to her based on little more than their appearance, she must now develop a new understanding of the world to replace that old one. In a sense, Sansa’s previous outlook on life is not entirely unlike Ned’s, as both naively believed certain people to be trustworthy who were in fact anything but.
Themes
