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Chapter 20
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
Mr. McCobb finds Demon a job at Golly’s Market, a gas station mini mart on Route 58. Demon’s job entails picking through the trash pile—a place where people pay a small fee to dump their trash—for valuables. On his first day, he finds Swap-Out working the trash pile too. Their boss is a guy named Ghost, who has white hair and tattoos and is one of Stoner’s friends. Demon gets paid $16 per day and can eat food at Golly’s Market. Following Ghost’s instructions, Demon drains battery acid into glass containers. He begins to suspect he’s working for a meth lab.
Demon cannot legally work because he is too young, so Mr. McCobb finds him a job at a trash heap that Demon suspects might also be a meth lab. The job shows just how little concern the McCobb family has for Demon. Like Crickson, the McCobbs are only interested in what Demon can do for them, and they don’t care about him or his wellbeing.
Themes
By the fifth grade, Demon is taller than almost everyone, including teachers. Boys want him on their teams when they play games, and girls flirt with him. Everything changes, though, when Demon finds “shit eater loser trash jerkoff” and “asshole” written by his name in an anonymous book that lists students’ names and other kids’ opinions of them. Afterward, Demon notices people avoiding him in gym or pretending to smell the air when he’s close by. Demon tells Mrs. McCobb he’s being tormented at school and that people know he’s living with the McCobbs. Hearing that people are insulting the McCobb name makes Mrs. McCobb sit up. She takes Demon to Walmart to buy new clothes. But the new clothes don’t make Demon feel any better at school. He thinks they make him look even more pitiful because now it seems like he’s trying to fit in and still failing.
This passage shows the novel’s views on social stratification, hierarchies, and stereotypes. At the start of the year, Demon is popular in school. As his poverty becomes more evident, though, students start to bully him. Though nothing about Demon’s personality has changed, students treat him entirely differently based on their perception of his socioeconomic status. The novel shows that the social ostracization of Demon is based, then, on stereotypes and prejudice against people living in poverty. That exclusion also, of course, pushes Demon further from finding the kind of community and belonging he is searching for.
Themes
