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Chapter 35
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Lonesome Dove, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
American Mythology
Family
Luck, Fate, and Chance
The Good Life
The Meaning of Masculinity
Feminine Strength
Summary
Analysis
Back on the Arkansas River, Elmira travels upriver with a crowd of drunk whiskey traders led by a man named Fowler and a bunch of rough, crude buffalo hunters. The men make her nervous, but to her surprise, no one approaches her. In the long hot afternoons, Ellie finds herself thinking about Dee. She’s anxious to get back to him, and she’s glad to have been relieved, finally, of the burden of her son Joe. Early one morning, she hears a fight break out between two men. When the sun rises, one lies dead on the deck. The others strip his body of valuables and throw the corpse overboard. Fowler tells her that the dead man was interested in her, but that Big Zwey, one of the buffalo hunters—who has taken a shine to her and wants to marry her—killed him.
Elmira and Dee parted ways in the wake of her frightening experience with an abusive buffalo hunter. In her quest to find Dee once again, she puts herself back into the exact same kind of danger. Instead of accepting where her choices and circumstances bring her, Elmira spends most of her time trying to run away from the consequences of her actions. In this way, she isn’t unlike Jake. And the precarity of her situation suggests the weakness of this as a survival strategy.
Themes
