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Pukkons
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
On the ride to Rugby, Doris asks Patrice if she has a boyfriend. She says she’s heard that Barnes likes her. Patrice says she hasn’t heard anything about it. After a while, Doris asks her what she thinks of Bucky Duvalle, and to Patrice, it’s like someone is poking an electric wire into her brain. Patrice tells Doris about how Bucky and his friends gave her a ride last summer and at first promised and then refused to take her where she wanted to go. They trapped her, and Bucky threw himself at her, then they took her down the road to have a “picnic” at Fish Lake, where Patrice pretended to go along with what they wanted. But then she jumped into the lake and swam to her uncle, Thomas’s, boat.
Patrice describes the sexual assault she experienced the summer before. It’s an example of the violence that often, though not always, accompanies sex in the novel. Patrice is able to escape when she fights back and swims to the boat belonging to Thomas, a man with power and standing in the community who uses what standing he has to help others instead of using it to try and get what he wants.
Themes
Doris tells Patrice that her brother is friends with Bucky. Patrice understands then that Doris’s brother was one of the boys in the car with Bucky and that Doris heard about what had happened from him. Patrice knows she can’t trust Doris anymore. Patrice asks what her brother said, and Doris says that he told her that “Bucky was a jackass” and that he didn’t know why Patrice went into the bushes with him. Patrice says that’s not what happened, and Doris says she defended Patrice to her brother. She then says that her brother told her that Bucky made him say that. When Patrice asks why, Doris tells her that Bucky thinks if he ruins Patrice’s reputation, then she’ll have no choice but to pick him, as he’ll be the only option left. Doris says that Bucky likes her just like Barnes does. She tells Patrice she should be glad that at least someone likes her.
Patrice confronts complex and competing loyalties while she’s talking to Doris, complicating the novel’s theme of solidarity. On the one hand, Patrice might expect Doris, a new friend from the jewel bearing plant, to understand how horrific her experience in the car was, that it was sexual assault that would have escalated if she hadn’t escaped. When Patrice understands that Doris’s brother was in the car, though, Patrice knows she can’t trust Doris, that Doris will potentially twist events without regard for what actually happened, until those events fit the narrative her brother told her, that she’ll ultimately betray Patrice if it helps her brother save face or maintain some kind of innocence. Doris seals her after-the-fact complicity in what her brother did by bemoaning Patrice’s inability to be happy that someone likes her, a sentiment that shows how gender norms and expectations of the time didn’t just lead to gender-based violence by men directed against women, but also impacted how women interacted with each other.
Themes
