Son

by

Lois Lowry

Themes and Colors
Pain and Maternal Love Theme Icon
Travel, Fitting In, and Values Theme Icon
Emotion, Individuality, and the Human Experience Theme Icon
Family and Coming of Age Theme Icon
Community and Sacrifice Theme Icon
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

Son follows Claire, a Birthmother in a dystopian community whose first birth goes horribly: Claire’s son is ultimately delivered by emergency C-section. As with all births in the settlement, her son—the Product, who’s later named Gabe—is taken immediately from the blindfolded Claire to ultimately be given to a couple in the community to raise, while Claire is never allowed to see, hold, or know her baby. Traumatized by the experience and overwhelmed with…

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Travel, Fitting In, and Values

In Son, various characters travel great distances, both physically and emotionally. Travel, and finding a place to call home, is something the novel suggests allows a person to find happiness—and perhaps more importantly, to pinpoint exactly what they value. For instance, as Claire gradually becomes aware of how boring, cruel, and detached her and Gabe’s original community is, she discovers what she values more than anything: her love for her son, an emotion…

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Emotion, Individuality, and the Human Experience

Through its three sections, Son explores the depth and breadth of human emotion—as well as what life is like without it. Overwhelmingly, the novel suggests that in order to live a truly fulfilling life, a person must experience a full range of emotion and a variety of experiences (both good and bad). In the novel’s second section, Claire learns how wildly difficult life can be. People in the remote village experience numerous tragedies as people…

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Family and Coming of Age

Son presents two unique coming-of-age stories, as both Claire and Gabe’s process of maturing has to do with the way they piece together their family history and connections. Whereas other coming-of-age stories might simply concern themselves with the mere fact that everyone gets older over time, Claire and Gabe’s stories are directly tied to the fact that they come from a settlement that experiences no conflict, emotions, choice, or—importantly—biological family connections. In Son

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Community and Sacrifice

In the communities Claire and Gabe live in throughout Son, they experience three different ideas of what it means to be a good, involved community member and work for the common good. While their first community is framed as a cruel dystopia, and while the latter two still experience their fair share of pain and heartbreak, the novel nevertheless suggests that what makes a community strong is people’s willingness to make sacrifices for the…

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