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Feather
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Flames, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Grief and Human Connection
Nature vs. Human Effort
Sexism
Love and Respect
Summary
Analysis
In her book Cream, Butter and Small-Town Nutters, Mavis Midcurrent acknowledges the people of Avoca who have played important parts in her life. She lists Larry, who works at the gas station; the mayor; Garth Burbank, one of the winners of the male beauty pageant she judges; and the members of the Country Women’s Association as her fondest friends. On the other hand, she singles out Thurston Hough as the least pleasant man in the area. For instance, after arriving in Avoca, he claimed the postwoman invaded his privacy by delivering his mail. When she persisted, he posted signs around town attacking her character. Shortly after this, the postwoman died.
After the previous chapter, which ended with a huge fire and a man’s painful transformation into a birdlike creature, it’s hard to appreciate Mavis’s sweetness, with her alliterative name and her book’s rhyming title. In this way, the turbulence of the natural world overwhelms the novel itself—characters feel insignificant in the face of the wild, primal transformation the reader witnessed just pages earlier.
Themes
Mavis goes on to describe Thurston’s antisocial behavior, including shooting at accidental trespassers with an air rifle and claiming that the Country Women’s Association was infecting the population with mind-control chemicals on the government’s behalf. However, just as the Avoca residents started organizing to have him removed, Thurston died, and his body was eaten by water rats. Mavis can’t find anything positive to say about Thurston, and she assures her reader that nobody else can, either—not even the young man (Levi) who found his body. When that man left, he took with him a half-finished coffin and a golden pelt.
Mavis’s perspective allows the reader to understand how those around Thurston view him: not only is he at odds with his natural environment, but he’s also remarkably antisocial and suspicious of the motives of people who seem to get along with one another.
Themes
