Previous
Chapter 4
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Motorcycles & Sweetgrass, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Cultural Maintenance vs. Loss
Grief and Trauma
Colonialism and Land Use
Stories and Religion
Humor
Summary
Analysis
Lillian’s funeral is attended by everyone in Otter Lake, including Sammy Aandeg, who became a dejected alcoholic after his experiences in the residential school. The man with the motorcycle is not there, and Virgil wonders about him while members of the community speak about how much Lillian meant to them. Clifford Second, Maggie’s husband and Virgil’s father, is buried nearby, and Maggie reflects on her troubled marriage to him. She resents the Band Office (the municipal First Nations government) as the bureaucracy that kept Clifford away from his family, and she imagines Clifford laughing at her attempts to deal with it now. Virgil still feels numb about his father’s death, and he worries about his mother pursuing Clifford’s lifestyle.
The funeral makes apparent the two kinds of grief that affect the Otter Lake community: personal grief and cultural grief. Sammy Aandeg embodies the generation of children lost or torn from their families by residential school, and the grief for those children and that cultural loss is always present in the background of the story. In the foreground is Maggie and Virgil’s personal grief for Lillian and Clifford. Maggie copes with her husband’s death by following in his footsteps as chief, but that decision, made in grief, only adds to her stress and strains her relationship with Virgil.
Themes
Virgil sees the man with the motorcycle arrive at the graveyard and watch the funeral from a distance. Lillian’s call pulled the man out of “his self-imposed purgatory,” and now he must decide whether to return to that life or honor Lillian’s last request. As he considers this, the man takes notice of the attractive Maggie and decides that it’s worth pursuing a woman for the first time in years. This decision, along with the fact that Lillian’s request is the first interesting thing to happen to him in a long time, instills him with a sense of purpose. The man looks over to Sammy Aandeg and muses that he could be put to use. Meanwhile, on the island in the lake, Wayne sits alone and wonders if he should have given up his commitment to his isolated lifestyle and attended Lillian’s funeral.
Though the man’s deteriorating state comes in part from the Anishnawbe people’s decreasing belief in him, it also comes from his childish resentment that he has been rejected by those people, which is why his purgatory was “self-imposed.” He could have returned at any point, but he chose not to. Wayne’s own hermit-like life on his island mirrors the stranger’s self-imposed exile and foreshadows the similarities between them.
Themes
Upgrade to unlock the analysis and theme tracking for all of Motorcycles & SweetgrassMotorcycles & Sweetgrass!
Get LitCharts A+
