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Chapter 14
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Demon Copperhead, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Exploitation
Class, Social Hierarchy, and Stereotypes
Pain and Addiction
Toxic Masculinity
Community and Belonging
Summary
Analysis
On November 19, Demon’s eleventh birthday, he gets called to the office at school. He thinks finally everyone has remembered it’s his birthday. He finds Miss Barks waiting for him in the office, and she says she has bad news: Mom is dead. Demon doesn’t want to hear any of it and yells at Miss Barks. He asks her how Mom died. Miss Barks says “oxy.” Demon hasn’t heard of oxy before and asks what it is.
Mom dies from an overdose of OxyContin just after Demon finishes harvesting tobacco for an abusive person who works in an exploitative industry. The novel draws a connection, then, between the tobacco industry and the pharmaceutical industry, which has, during the time the novel takes place, just begun its campaign to overly prescribe dangerously and often fatally addictive opioid painkillers.
Themes
