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Chapter 54
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Eleanor and Park, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Adolescence and Shame
Love and Intimacy
Poverty and Class
Family and Abuse
Summary
Analysis
Park doesn’t ride the bus anymore. He drives his mother’s Impala—even though it is “ruined with memories” of Eleanor. Park misses Eleanor all day, every day, and can’t even listen to music in her absence.
Eleanor doesn’t ride the bus anymore, either—her uncle drives her to school. Even though there are only four weeks left in the term, Eleanor goes each day. Her uncle drives down to Omaha to retrieve Eleanor’s things from her old house, even though he and her aunt have already bought her new clothes, a bookcase, a boom box, and plenty of blank cassette tapes.
Eleanor, too, struggles with how much of a hold she should keep on the past. So many of her memories from Omaha are painful—and though replacing and paving over them also seems too difficult to do, she knows she must make a choice.
Themes
The narrative switches to Park’s point of view. After Eleanor got out of the car when they arrived at her uncle’s house, Park waited for her on the street, even though he wasn’t supposed to. He watched Eleanor’s aunt and uncle welcome her warmly into the house, and only then did he drive away. He sent Eleanor a postcard from the first rest stop he visited on the way back to Nebraska, and another as soon as he got home—but Eleanor didn’t call him that first night, and hasn’t called or written since.
As Park reflects on the aftermath of parting from Eleanor, he feels almost ashamed of his faith in the fact that Eleanor would actually keep in touch with him.
Themes
The narrative switches to Eleanor’s point of view. She reveals that after her aunt and uncle welcomed her inside that first day, she ran back out to the porch to get one last look at Park—but he was already gone. Eleanor wrote her mother a letter that first night urging her to get out of Richie’s house, but she didn’t write anything to Park.
Eleanor thought she was ready to “just stop” things with Park but now sees that she made the wrong choice in cutting things off so definitively. She has the chance to make things better by writing him letters, but it seems that she is afraid to admit her own mistakes—and nervous that making herself vulnerable might leave her hurting worse than she already is.
Themes
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Park writes Eleanor letters all the time, but never receives any back. Soon, he gets word that Eleanor’s whole family has picked up and moved away, although Richie is still living in the house. Meanwhile, in St. Paul, Eleanor thinks frequently about calling Park—but when her new friend at school Dani asks her if she’s ever had a boyfriend or shared a kiss with anyone, Eleanor says she hasn’t. She can’t bear to think of Park slowly loving her less, so has decided to “just stop” things between them. Back in Omaha, Park sometimes goes by Eleanor’s old house just to stand there, hating everything it stands for.
As Eleanor and Park’s lives move forward separately, they approach the passage of time in different ways. The novel suggests that Park lingers too much in the past, while Eleanor denies it too fervently. Their reactions to the grief of losing one another are very different but rooted in the same sense of overwhelming pain, shame, and sadness.
Themes
