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Chapter 58
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 gets taken down from the waterfall on a stretcher alongside Hammer and Fast Forward. The two bodies go in one ambulance, and Demon goes in another to be taken to the hospital and treated for exposure. Maggot rides with him in the ambulance. The next morning, Rose gets in to visit him by pretending she’s his sister. When she gets to Demon’s room, she calls him a “murderer.” She wants him to tell her exactly what happened, and he does. Rose says he and Demon are accessories to murder—not for Fast Forward’s death but Hammer’s—because they gave him drugs.
Even though Demon and Maggot have both lost Hammer in the same accident that claimed Fast Forward’s life, Rose wants to see both of them punished. The fact that Hammer was on drugs, then, becomes not just something that might have driven him to act more recklessly than usual: it becomes the central fact that Rose will use to try and make sure Demon and Maggot receive some kind of punishment, showing again the unpredictable and sprawling impact of addiction.
Themes
When he’s released from the hospital, Demon returns to Mrs. Peggot’s house. It falls on him to tell the Peggots how Hammer died. Maggot is too high to do it. When Demon talks about Hammer’s death, he leaves out the detail of the rifle and doesn’t say that Hammer went to Devil’s Bathtub to confront Fast Forward. Later, Mrs. Peggot gets a letter from the court, which says they are investigating the deaths. The authorities have information that Maggot supplied drugs to one of the people who died. They don’t mention murder, but Maggot could be charged with accessory to death. His court date is scheduled for the same week Mariah, his mother, will be released from prison.
The novel underlines the fact that so much of the addiction in the novel is the result of generational. Just as Demon became addicted to drugs like his mom was before him, Maggot follows in his mother’s footsteps when he goes to court and may be sent to prison. The novel argues that the similarities between Maggot, Demon, and their mothers are not coincidences. Instead, they are the result of the trauma one generation experienced being passed on to the next generation.
Themes
June tells Demon that she can get him enrolled in a Suboxone clinic. She says that after that, he’ll go into a halfway house. “It’ll be all work and no play, for a while,” June tells him. Demon realizes this is all he ever wanted: “a mother, simple as that.” She says that rehab will be in Knoxville and that she doesn’t want him to return to Lee County for a year. Demon says he’ll consider it, but he thinks that June knows he’s lying.
Demon has reached the lowest point of his life. Hammer and Fast Forward have both died, as have Dori and Demon's mom. Again, community and a sense of belonging remain of paramount importance to Demon, as June, a member of his surrogate family, steps in with an offer to help him get clean and begin a new chapter in his life.
Themes
