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Book 2, Chapter 16
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Son, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Pain and Maternal Love
Travel, Fitting In, and Values
Emotion, Individuality, and the Human Experience
Family and Coming of Age
Community and Sacrifice
Summary
Analysis
As Gabe works alone near the river, the old woman (Claire) appears often. He doesn’t know who she is, though he sees her around town, too, and feels like she’s watching him there as well. Occasionally, he considers using his power, which he calls “veering,” to figure out who she is. But since he’s a little bit afraid of his power and doesn’t understand it, he seldom uses it for any reason. Now, she’s just disappeared again, so Gabe turns his attention back to his boards. It’s going to storm soon, so he needs to put away his tools. As he does, he thinks of the woman. There’s always a ceremony to welcome newcomers where they share their histories, but Gabe doesn’t remember one for her. And he would’ve been little then, and he doesn’t like the ceremonies anyway—people cry, and he feels embarrassed.
Readers can assume the woman is Claire, Gabe’s mother—and it’s clear that she hasn’t told him who she is for some reason. This passage mirrors the first book in that Gabe, like then-teenaged Claire, is working alongside a river and doesn’t seem to understand much about his world. Instead, he’s focused on a (still somewhat ambiguous) project and feels uncomfortable with other people’s emotions. His reasons for this discomfort, though, are of course different than Claire’s. While Claire had to learn that emotions exist at all, Gabe simply must learn how to respond to other people’s.
Themes
A bit later, Gabe enters the Boys’ Lodge where he lives with other orphaned boys. Most of the other boys can share exactly how they lost their parents, but Gabe can’t. He’s asked Jonas multiple times about his parents, but Jonas simply says that where Gabe came from, he didn’t have parents yet. Babies were assigned to couples, and they had young girls called “birthmothers,” but Jonas never questioned or knew where babies came from. Gabe found this ludicrous; everyone knows where babies come from. At age nine, he vowed to Jonas to figure out how to get back and find his birthmother.
It's impossible for Gabe to fully understand how his original society worked and, particularly, how it kept basic knowledge from its citizens. With this, the novel highlights how shockingly cruel, inhuman, and unbelievable Claire’s original settlement was. Like Claire, Gabe is motivated to figure out who he is and to do this by learning about his familial connections.
Themes
While life is pleasant at the Boys’ Lodge, Gabe often wishes he lived with a family. His best friend Nathaniel has a family—including a pretty sister named Deirdre. Seeing her cat outside Nathaniel’s front door, Gabe considers veering to find out if she reciprocates his crush. But he reasons it’s not worth it. Soon, his boat will be done and he’ll leave.
While the narrative has been vague about what veering actually allows Gabe to do, it seems to allow him to get into another’s perspective and see how they feel. In other words, he can somehow empathize with them. His desire to leave this village on a boat also mirrors the first part of the book: like Claire, he sees the river as an escape.
Themes
