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Part 3, Chapter 1
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Our Missing Hearts, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Free Speech, Patriotism, and the Corruption of Truth
Surveillance, Fear, and Discrimination
The Power of Art and Imagination
Parental Responsibility, Rights, and Experience
Privilege, Silence, and Complicity
Summary
Analysis
At sundown, Margaret puts her plan into action. She uses an old laptop to connect to all the weather-proof bottle caps she has hidden throughout the city. Inside each is a receiver and a tiny speaker, through which she will—at last—raise her voice. Domi provided the hardware, and Margaret researched the logistics during the long nights she spent in libraries. After the bottle caps connect, she begins to read from her notebooks, broadcasting the tales of removed children all over New York City. Though a recording would be safer, Margaret feels the need to tell their stories live: she needs to be there for these children in a tangible way she wasn’t for her mother and father.
Margaret’s plan invokes the power of narrative and story to raise awareness and provoke empathy in her listeners. This plan is both simple and powerful: she holds her audience captive and tells them the truth, a truth that PACT has spent years corrupting and silencing. In this way, she confronts authoritarianism with honesty and the simple truth that removing children isn’t good for anyone.
Themes
Across the city, New Yorkers stop and listen to Margaret’s disembodied voice emanating from the speakers. Though the stories belong to strangers, hearing the stories makes the listeners feel connected to a larger narrative. Margaret recites all the traits that parents loved about their children. She explains how those children were taken and what their parents wish they could tell them now. She hopes that the children will be remembered as unique individuals. Though she could go on forever, she knows the authorities will be tracking her location as they find and snuff out the speakers, one by one.
Margaret’s broadcast breaks through the silent isolation citizens experience under PACT’s culture of paranoid fear, connecting them to one another as they experience this art piece together. Margaret hopes that the stories will shake people from their complacency by forcing them to face the injustices taking place with their implicit blessing. By emphasizing the individuality of each child taken, Margaret reminds people that these taken children aren’t faceless or numbers. They’re real people who are cherished, and who have been taken from their loving parents.
Themes
Margaret’s plan is to flee when the authorities get close. She will smash the laptop and then run to Domi on Park Avenue. But she miscalculates the time and reads for too long, until she hears the sound of police cars outside. Margaret does not know if her actions have made any difference. As the authorities close in, she feels deep regret for all the ways she has accidentally hurt Bird, forming a list of failures in her mind. She sets the remaining notebooks ablaze. Speaking directly to Bird through her speakers, she says she told him stories to make sense of the world and that she loves him very much. She smashes the laptop as the door behind her opens.
Though Margaret is the solitary voice behind the broadcast, the collected stories recall the horde of cats in the story she once told Bird, whose combined strength defeats the monster. Though it’s not clear whether her protest will make a difference, Margaret’s belief in the power of art is strong, as she risks her own safety to continue reading. The regret she feels as the authorities close in underscores the difficult choices parents face in trying to protect their children from the world, while also making the world safe for their children. Her final message to Bird relates that stories, though not always true, can help to make sense of life. In this way, art—which has been characterized as a privileged pursuit in past chapters—is here depicted as an act of resistance, a way of imagining an alternative, better world.
Themes
