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Chapter 35
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in America Is in the Heart, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Beauty in Despair
Race and American Identity
Education vs. Ignorance
Poverty
Summary
Analysis
The summer heat spurs more deaths in Carlos’s hospital ward, but he spends his time on the outdoor porch near the only tree near the building. “The tree began to indicate recovery and survival for me,” he writes. Other patients share this superstition about the tree, and patients who spend time on the porch appear to make swifter recoveries than those who languish inside the hospital. Though Carlos is sad to be confined by illness, he nonetheless has food, books, friends, a porch, and Eileen, whereas outside he had only violence and despair. He continues to read and write poetry and wonders if an immigrant like himself can actually achieve the “American dream.” For Carlos, the dismal hospital has actually become “a world of hope.”
Throughout the novel, nature frequently offers Carlos a hopeful respite from the struggles he endures in the human world. Here, the lone tree near the hospital bed comes to symbolize the beauty of the natural world from which Carlos drew much inspiration before his illness. In addition, the positive impact the tree seems to have on the other patients helps Carlos further appreciate the fact that joy and hope can come from unusual sources.
Themes
Carlos’s growing intellectualism isolates him from most of the other patients in the hospital. “I acquired a mask of pretense that became a weapon I was to take out with me into the violent world again,” he writes, “a mask of pretense at ignorance and illiteracy” to stave off rejection from others who might reject him for his intellectual abilities. He becomes increasingly lonely and attempts to get out of the hospital by inquiring into a dismissal from the Social Service Department. But they reject his request for transfer to a sanitarium on the grounds that he was a minor when he arrived in America and, therefore, has no guardian to sign the release papers.
Education is tremendously important to the arc of Carlos’s life. It is his means of becoming a more fulfilled human being, as well as a tool he embraces in order to free himself from the clutches of poverty. However, even education has a downside, as his intellectual development threatens here to invoke the jealously of those who have not had the privilege of an education. Carlos has worked hard to become the educated person he is, but now he sees that even an excellent education can be isolating when not everyone shares that advantage. Again, Carlos runs up against the realities of inequality in American life.
Themes
Even Carlos’s doctor supports his release, and is angry that he must remain at the hospital over a mere technicality. He resubmits his case to the Social Service Department, but a racist woman in the department tells him that Filipinos “ought to be shipped back to [their] jungle homes!” He confides his rage at the incident to Macario, who finally successfully secures Carlos’s release from the hospital after two years.
Even in the generally nurturing environment of the hospital, Carlos encounters the kind of ugly racism that he knows awaits him when he returns to the outside world. Discrimination, this sequence of event reminds Carlos, is present even in otherwise positive environments.
Themes
