The Dew Breaker

by

Edwidge Danticat

Themes and Colors
Grief, Memory, and Erasure Theme Icon
Victims vs. Perpetrators Theme Icon
Love, Hope, and Redemption Theme Icon
Violence vs. Care Theme Icon
Diaspora, Interconnection, and Haunting Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Dew Breaker, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Violence vs. Care Theme Icon

The Dew Breaker contains harrowing depictions of violence, but also many descriptions of care. In a sense, violence and care represent the process of destruction versus reconstruction, on both personal and societal levels. Through violence, the Duvalier regime was a powerfully destructive force, and in its aftermath the book’s characters are left trying to rebuild themselves, their lives, and their country. Yet Danticat also shows how violence and care, despite being opposites, have a very close relationship with one another. This is particularly emphasized via the fact that so much of the violence in the novel is intimate—not just in the sense that much of it is committed within intimate relationships (such as Claude killing his father), but in the sense that all violence involves a sort of perverse physical intimacy. 

The connection between violence and care emerges early in the book through the juxtaposition of Papa and Nadine’s stories. The description of Papa’s career as a torturer includes the claim that he was “just one of hundreds who had done their jobs so well that their victims were never able to speak of them again.” Nadine, meanwhile, is a nurse who works in an Ear, Nose, and Throat ward, and is often caring for patients who wake up from surgery to realize that they can no longer speak. Although in some sense the description of Papa’s victims uses speaking as a euphemism (as most of his victims end up dead), this parallel nonetheless illustrates a significant connection between these two very different types of work. Papa takes away people’s ability to speak as a method of political oppression, whereas Nadine cares for people whose loss of speech is a necessary side effect of medical treatment. In caring for people, Nadine allows them to keep living, helping them to thrive. In this sense, although Papa and Nadine both “silence” people, the work they do has two completely oppositional effects. 

At the same time, the descriptions of Nadine’s work highlight that many of her patients experience the care they receive at the hospital as a kind of violence. Most are frightened and horrified to realize that they can no longer speak (as is true of Ms. Hinds, the patient featured in the story). They feel violated by the procedures they undergo, and are left in both physical and psychic pain afterward. While there is of course no real equivalent between torture and medical procedures, it is significant that medical patients can feel violated and harmed as if they had been inflicted with violence.

The connection between violence and care is further illuminated by one of the torture victim’s descriptions of why Papa was so cruel: “He’d wound you, then try to soothe you with words, then he’d wound you again. He thought he was God.” This quotation shows that Papa weaved care into his torture procedure in order to enact even more cruelty. This highlights how, in certain contexts, care can actually be a means to enact violence. The implication of this is disturbing, because it suggests that the kindness and care Papa shows after his life as a torturer ends (to Anne, Ka, and his barbershop clients) may not be as far removed from his practice as a torturer as the reader might at first assume.  

The connection between violence and care is also revealed to work in the other direction, wherein what might initially seem like violence is actually a form of care. The best example of this comes in the description of the preacher’s brief time in prison. After being taken from the church and brutally beaten, the preacher passes out in his prison cell. He wakes up to the feeling of warm water on his face and goes to drink, only to realize it is urine. At first it seems that this is an act of the prison guards, further torturing and degrading the preacher by urinating on him. However, afterward he realizes that it is actually his fellow prisoners, who believe that urinating on wounds can serve as a healing, “ritual cure.” Once again, the close proximity between violence and care emerges through the fact that they both involve physical intimacy. Certain acts can only be understood as either violence or care once the context in which they are taking place is made clear.

Violence and care are also linked due to the fact that so much of the violence depicted in the book takes place in an intimate context. Many of the perpetrators of violence have some kind of intimate connection to their victim. For example, Claude kills his father, and the preacher Papa kills ends up becoming his brother-in-law. As the book notes, the power of the regime operates through the fact that those who serve it must be ready to kill their own family members in order to demonstrate their loyalty. In other words, the violence of the regime is intensified by the fact that it colonizes every aspect of a person’s life—even their intimate relationships.

Meanwhile, because of the pervasive nature of the violence of the Duvalier regime, many nonviolent characters have to negotiate their intimate proximity to violent people. This is obviously true of Anne and is also true of Léon, the shoeshine man whose son works for the Duvalier regime. Léon reasons that although he deplores what his son does, “he still had to let the boy come home now and then for the boy’s mother’s sake and still had to acknowledge that maybe it was because of his boy that he’d not yet been arrested.” The moral challenge of having a violent son becomes even more complicated by the fact that Léon’s proximity to his son may be saving his life. In this sense, the violence that Léon’s son enacts on others becomes a perverse sort of care for his father, protecting Léon from violence. Once again, the pervasive nature of violence under Duvalier and the strange overlap between violence and care mean that neither violence nor care can be totally extricated from one another. 

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Violence vs. Care ThemeTracker

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Violence vs. Care Quotes in The Dew Breaker

Below you will find the important quotes in The Dew Breaker related to the theme of Violence vs. Care.
The Book of the Dead Quotes

My father has never liked having his picture taken. We have only a few of him at home, some awkward shots at my different school graduations, with him standing between my mother and me, his hand covering his scar. I had hoped to take some pictures of him on this trip, but he hadn't let me. At one of the rest stops I bought a disposable camera and pointed it at him anyway. As usual, he protested, covering his face with both hands like a little boy protecting his cheeks from a slap. He didn't want any more pictures taken of him for the rest of his life, he said, he was feeling too ugly.

Related Characters: Ka Bienaimé (speaker), Papa , Anne Bienaimé/Landlady
Related Symbols: Papa’s Scar
Page Number: 5
Explanation and Analysis:

I’d used a piece of mahogany that was naturally flawed, with a few superficial cracks along what was now the back. I’d thought these cracks beautiful and had made no effort to sand or polish them away, as they seemed like the wood's own scars, like the one my father had on his face. But I was also a little worried about the cracks. Would they seem amateurish and unintentional, like a mistake? Could the wood come apart with simple movements or with age? Would the client be satisfied?

Related Characters: Ka Bienaimé (speaker), Papa
Related Symbols: Papa’s Scar, The Sculpture
Page Number: 7
Explanation and Analysis:
The Book of Miracles Quotes

Besides, soon after her husband had opened his barbershop, he’d discovered that since he'd lost eighty pounds, changed his name, and given as his place of birth a village deep in the mountains of Leogane, no one asked about him anymore, thinking he was just a peasant who'd made good in New York. He hadn't been a famous “dew breaker,” or torturer, anyway, just one of hundreds who had done their jobs so well that their victims were never able to speak of them again.

Related Characters: Papa , Anne Bienaimé/Landlady
Page Number: 76-77
Explanation and Analysis:
Night Talkers Quotes

In spite of his huge muscles and oversized tattoos, Claude seemed oddly defenseless, like a refugee lost at sea, or a child looking for his parents in a supermarket aisle. Or maybe that’s just how Dany wanted to see him, to make him seem more normal, less frightening.

Related Characters: Dany , Claude
Page Number: 118
Explanation and Analysis:
Monkey Tails: February 7, 1986 / February 7, 2004 Quotes

I was twelve years old and, according to my mother, three months before my birth I had lost my father to something my mother would only vaguely describe as “political,” making me part of a generation of mostly fatherless boys, though some of our fathers were still living, even if somewhere else—in the provinces in another country, or across the ally not acknowledging us. A great many of our fathers had also died in the dictatorship’s prisons, and others had abandoned us altogether to serve the regime.

Related Characters: Michel (speaker), Michel’s Mother, Monsieur Christophe
Page Number: 141
Explanation and Analysis:
The Funeral Singer Quotes

My mother used to say that we'll all have three deaths: the one when our breath leaves our bodies to rejoin the air, the one when we are put back in the earth, and the one that will erase us completely and no one will remember us at all.

Related Characters: Freda (speaker)
Page Number: 177
Explanation and Analysis:
The Dew Breaker (Circa 1967) Quotes

He’d wound you, then try to soothe you with words, then he’d wound you again. He thought he was God.

Related Characters: Papa
Page Number: 199
Explanation and Analysis:

But he could never shake from his thoughts the notion that his wife’s death had been his fault, that she’d been killed to punish him for the things he said on his radio program or from the pulpit of his church.

Related Characters: The Preacher
Page Number: 207
Explanation and Analysis:

Léon, the shoeshine man, wiped a tear from his eye, remembering his own son who was one of those men who roamed the night in denim uniforms and carried people away to their deaths. His son might have been one of those he’d emptied the slop jars on and who had shot in his direction in return, for a good Volunteer, it was said, should be able to kill his mother and father for the regime.

Even though Léon hated what his son did, he still had to let his boy come home now and then for the boy’s mother's sake and still had to acknowledge that maybe it was because of his boy that he'd not yet been arrested.

Related Characters: Léon
Page Number: 208-209
Explanation and Analysis:

He had been counting on a quick death, not one where he would disappear in stages of prolonged suffering interrupted by a few seconds of relief. He had never thought he’d have reason to hope that maybe his life might be spared. He hadn’t expected the kindness of his cellmates, men of different skin tones and social classes all thrown together in this living hell and helping one another survive it.

Related Characters: The Preacher
Page Number: 224-225
Explanation and Analysis:

Maybe be shouldn’t have preached those “sermons to the beast,” as he liked to think of them. But someone needed to stir the flock out of their stupor, the comfort that religion allowed them, that it was okay to have wretched lives here on earth so long as Heaven was glowing ahead. Maybe his death would do just that, move his people to revolt, to demand justice for themselves while requesting it for him. Or maybe his death would have no relevance at all. He would simply join a long list of martyrs and his name would vanish from his countrymen's lips as soon as his body was placed in the ground.

Related Characters: The Preacher
Page Number: 227
Explanation and Analysis: