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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
Demon starts living in Dori’s old car, an Impala, until Maggot finds him. Mrs. Peggot says she wants Demon to move in with them. Demon moves, and he and Maggot go on a bender that lasts for about a month. He can only barely keep helping Tommy with the comic strip. In June, Demon runs into Rose Dartell. She says Fast Forward is back in Lee County and asks if Demon wants to see him. At first, Demon can’t imagine going. But then he gets Maggot, and the two of them follow Rose’s pickup truck to where Fast Forward is living.
After Dori dies, Demon seems to have lost all hope. He abandons any plans to get sober and isn’t really helping Tommy with the comic. Moreover, when he hears that Fast Forward is in town, he decides to visit him, even knowing what Fast Forward has done to Emmy. This shows how little Demon seems to care about the decisions he makes now. As the novel has previously established, wherever Fast Forward is, trouble follows.
Themes
On the way, they see Hammer with a flat tire. Demon thinks Hammer looks downright pitiful. He said he would never get over Emmy, and Demon thinks it seems like he’s keeping his promise. Demon gets out to help and ends up changing the tire. It’s raining hard, though, and he loses the lug nuts, and they have to leave Hammer’s truck. Before they drive away, Hammer retrieves his rifle from the truck. When they get to Fast Forward’s house, they’re greeted by the woman he’s living with, Temple. She gets them towels and coffee. She says Fast Forward is out at Devil’s Bathtub. When Hammer realizes they’re at Fast Forward’s house, he says they have to leave.
The writer Anton Chekhov famously wrote—as a way to describe the logic of narrative storytelling—that if a gun appears in the first act of a play, in the third act, that gun must go off. Hammer’s rifle serves as the proverbial Chekhov’s gun in this situation, and the fact that he runs back to get it from his truck foreshadows the pain the gun will later cause.
Themes
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