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Chapter 16
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Ella Minnow Pea, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Totalitarianism, Complacency, and Resistance
Freedom of Speech
Betrayal vs. Solidarity
Blind Faith, Reason, and Logic
Summary
Analysis
Ella writes to Rederick Lyttle using the entire alphabet, wherein she provides the 32-letter pangram, “Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs?” She says that the credit is due to Amos, but that he created the sentence unintentionally. Thus, she posits, anyone could have come up with a sentence even without knowing so, and thus Nollop need not have been a deity to come up with his own pangram. Lyttle writes back to Ella, accepting the sentence. He explains that all statutes have been rescinded.
Ella’s letter to Lyttle proves exactly the point that Nate made when they came up with the Enterprise Thirty-two challenge: that Nollop cannot be a deity if they can come up with a better pangram. This refutes the Council’s beliefs in their entirety, allowing Ella to disprove the basis of their blind faith.
Themes
Lyttle invites Ella and Tom for tea with him. Ella then writes to Gwenette, Amos, Mittie, and Tassie, explaining what has happened. She tells them that the Council members declared the pangram a miracle. Ella explains that it was not a miracle, though, and that Nollop’s first pangram was not a miracle either. She writes that Mr. Lyttle took her and Tom down to a vault with preserved documents from Nollop’s history that were spared from censorship. He showed Ella and Tom a children’s book wherein a fox jumped over a “lazy dog,” which likely lead to the sentence Nollop created. She explains that Nollop might not even have written the sentence for which they credit him.
It is ironic that Lyttle has this reserve of documents on Nollop’s history—one of which essentially shows that Nollop likely didn’t come up with the pangram on his own. It illustrates, even after the fact, how corrupt the government had been. In trying to erase the island’s history, the Council guaranteed that it could not be challenged—only emphasizing the need for free speech and the ability to have access to one’s own history.
Themes
Ella goes on to say that all Council members except Lyttle resigned, and Harton Mangrove attempted suicide. She and Tom also destroyed Nollop’s statue with sledgehammers. Ella says that some survivors wanted to create a statue of her or Amos, but she suggested instead that they erect a sculpture of a large box filled with sixty moonshine jugs: “disorder to match the clutter and chaos of our marvelous language.” Ella concludes by saying that she cannot wait to see them all again.
In refusing to have a statue made of her or Amos, and instead glorifying language, Ella attempts to ensure that no one can ever put blind faith into a figure like Nollop again. Instead, faith should be put into the “marvelous language” that was the pride and joy of the island prior to the statutes.
Themes
In a final letter, Nate writes to a computer scientist in America, asking if he could come up with the shortest possible pangram they can create in English, with minimal proper names. The man writes back with four sentences. First, a 26-letter pangram: “J.Q. Vandz struck my big fox whelp.” One of the other three is “Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.”
The final letter of the novel illustrates the true fortune that Ella found in Amos’s sentence—as even a computer could not come up with much better pangrams than they were able to. Thus, Dunn implies how without that lucky find, the island could have easily descended into a state of devastation and oppression, all because no one felt they could stand up to the Council’s regime.
Themes
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