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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 goes to prom with Cat, a girl from work. Holding Cat’s hand feels, to Park, like holding the hand of a mannequin. The morning after the dance, Park’s father wakes him up by tossing a piece of mail onto Park’s bed—it is a postcard from Eleanor. Park is overjoyed, and as he reads it over, he feels “Something heavy and winged [take] off from his chest.” The postcard is “Just three words long.”
Park has begun to accept the colorless monotony of life without Eleanor—but then, out of the blue, a postcard from her shows up. Though Rowell doesn’t reveal what the postcard says, the “three words” could possibly be “I love you.” This would suggest that Eleanor does, after all, want to preserve all that she and Park discovered over the course of their crazy year together.
Themes
