AI ToolsNew
Tools to make learning and teaching easier
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
Pixie Paranteau fixes a jewel blank onto a block for drilling. Rage helps her focus, and she fumes that everyone keeps calling her Pixie when she wants them to call her by her real name, Patrice. Pixie means cute. But Patrice isn’t cute. She has a job. And she’s above the mess that happened when she accepted a ride from Bucky Duvalle and his friends when they lied about what she had done. And Patrice is above finding the brown bile from her father’s binge on the blouse she left in the kitchen. That morning she’d gotten a ride for the first time with Doris Lauder, a “white girl” new to the jewel plant. Patrice’s best friend, Valentine Blue, had been there too, but the whole time refused to use Pixie’s given name.
Patrice bristles against the expectations others have for her. They think of her as “cute,” which connotes, to Patrice, something childlike. Patrice wants to be taken seriously and to be thought of as an adult because she has a job, she’s the main breadwinner for her family, and she feels like an adult and not a child. Mostly, though, in her own life, Patrice doesn’t desire power so much as autonomy and control. She doesn’t want to be at the whims of others, of men, whether those men are Bucky Duvalle, who assaulted her the summer before, or her father, who wreaks havoc on their family whenever he’s home.
Themes
At the jewel plant, Mr. Walter Vold walks down the line, “lurkishly” observing the women work. Walter doesn’t allow speech on the line, though the women still talk to one another all day. He leaves his office every few hours to do his inspections. He tells Patrice she’s doing excellent work. At lunch, with the cafeteria not yet set up, Patrice realizes she’d been so rattled by her father’s outbursts that she had forgotten to cook her bread; she only has dough. At first, she tries to eat it, but then the other women pass her bits of food—a buttered bun, an oatmeal cookie, half of a bacon sandwich—for her to eat.
Walter Vold is another person who holds power, power that is tinged with lechery (how he “lurkishly” watches women) and that he uses to dehumanize others. At lunch, Patrice realizes that her father’s outbursts have also rattled her to the point that she’s forgotten food to eat. The women who she works with, though, come together in solidarity, counteracting the influence of individual men by coming together as a group and sharing food with Patrice.
Themes
Doris gives Patrice and Valentine a ride home, and Pixie asks to be dropped off before the path to the house so that Doris won’t see their yard, which is filled with junk and debris. At home, her mother is boiling water for tea. Her brother, Pokey, is at boxing practice. Her sister, Vera, has gone to Minneapolis with her new husband through the Placement and Relocation Office, which gave them some money, a place to live, and training for a job. Pixie misses Vera and the way she would make fun of everything. And without Vera, there’s no one to keep her father in check, and no way to make jokes at his expense that help soften the “shame” that comes with having him as a father. In the kitchen, Patrice’s father pleads with her mother for money.
Vera has left home with—or maybe has been taken away by—a new husband. Without Vera, Patrice feels like it’s just her against her father, and she doesn’t have the same ability to neutralize him that Vera does. And there’s no one to joke around with, to mitigate the pain with a sense of humor, which is a recurring theme throughout the novel—particularly the way that humor can help soften suffering.
Themes
Upgrade to unlock the analysis and theme tracking for all of The Night WatchmanThe Night Watchman!
Get LitCharts A+
Patrice stacks wood behind the house. It would be Pokey’s job, but he’s at boxing practice. Pokey looks up to Patrice; she’s the first person in their family to have a job, not a job making a living off the woods, like trapping, hunting, or berry-gathering, but a “white-people job.” Patrice saves a bit of every paycheck so that she can eventually follow Vera, who seems to have disappeared.
Patrice’s position as the family’s main breadwinner is reinforced here, as is her desire to eventually follow and find Vera. It’s also notable that Patrice thinks of her job, a reliable job that pays decently, as a “white-people job,” in part because it’s the kind of job that hasn’t customarily been available to Native people.
Themes
Get the entire The Night Watchman LitChart as a printable PDF.
