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The Bush Dance
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Night Watchman, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Power, Solidarity, and Community Action
Oppression and Supposed Good Intentions
Humor and Pain
Sex, Violence, and Gender
Agency and Exploitation
Summary
Analysis
The bush dance had gone on all night. In different visits to the woods, first with Doris and then Valentine, Barnes experienced kissing like he never had before. But he has feelings for Patrice, Barnes thinks. Or does he? Maybe, he thinks, he is becoming “promiscuous.”
It seems that Barnes’s obsession with Patrice can only fade if he has other romantic interests to take her place, not out of consideration for Patrice herself. In his Barnes-like way, he begins to contend with his own ideas about gender norms and his expectations for how he is “supposed” to feel based on those norms.
Themes
Thomas finds Barnes in the church and floats the idea of Barnes putting up a boxing card with a rematch between Joe Wobble and Wood Mountain as the main event. Thomas’s idea is that they’ll use it as a fundraiser to help them raise money for a delegation to travel to Washington, D.C. to give testimony against the Termination Bill. The repeat fight would draw a crowd, Thomas says, because, after the issue with the early bell ring when Wood Mountain had the advantage, the first fight wasn’t a fair fight. Barnes agrees, and the two begin planning.
While Barnes is presented in many ways throughout the novel as a character who is easy to deride, when Thomas approaches him about helping with a fundraiser to send a delegation to Washington, D.C., Barnes agrees. This shows not only that Barnes is amenable, under certain circumstances, to considering the needs of others, but also how effective Thomas is at mobilizing members of the community to oppose the Termination Bill.
Themes
The same week, Joe Wobble walks into the café where Barnes is eating. Barnes proposes the idea of the fight to Joe. Joe thinks about it and says he didn’t like what happened in the first fight and accepts. Afterward, when Barnes sees Wood Mountain, he says that Wobble walks in a lopsided way. Wood Mountain says Joe might just have been faking out Barnes. They decide they can do the same thing. Barnes says that Wood Mountain will wear a fake cast on his arm and will only take it off to train.
Joe Wobble is willing to acknowledge, and doesn’t condone, the tampering that happened in the first fight against Wood Mountain. At the same time, though, both Joe and Wood Mountain are willing to psych the other out by faking injuries. This dynamic interestingly puts Joe and Wood Mountain on somewhat equal footing. They both seem to have a sense of which potentially underhanded methods are okay and which cross the line, showing that they share an adherence to the same unwritten rules that undergird community. This sense that they might belong to the same community, though, is still complicated by the historical encroachment of Joe’s family on Wood Mountain’s family’s land. If Joe was aware of what had happened in the past, would he condone it or do something to rectify it? Or would he break the bonds of community by allowing the historical injustice to stand? The novel interestingly leaves those questions unanswered, showing the complex ways that the past impacts the present.
Themes
