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Lard on Bread
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
Thomas sits down at his night watchman job. He writes letters using the Palmer Method of penmanship, which he had been taught through painstaking exercises in boarding school. He writes to a senator, then to a newspaper columnist he knows. He finishes, as a reward to himself, by writing to his son Archie and daughter Ray.
The novel references Thomas’s time in boarding school here, foreshadowing the exploration of that time that will come later in the story. Thomas also “rewards himself” by writing letters to his children, showing that while he might be politically well-connected to a certain extent, his true passion and joy come from his family and from being a father.
Themes
Thomas drifts off to sleep. In his sleep, he sees a boy wearing the same canvas vest and pants that Thomas had worn at the government boarding school. When he wakes up, he reads the newspaper, then other tribes’ newsletters, where he learns of a bill that indicates that Congress is “fed up” with Native people. As he’s leaving, Thomas runs into the night janitor, LaBatte, and tells him about his dream of the little boy. LaBatte asks if the little boy was Roderick, and Thomas tells him no, saying it had just been the motor of the bandsaw, which, out of the corner of his eye, he had mistaken for a child.
Thomas sees the ghost of his boarding school classmate, Roderick, for the first time. Roderick died after contracting tuberculosis as the result of harsh punishments at boarding school. Those boarding schools functioned with the stated purpose of “helping” Native people, but Roderick’s death shows how destructive those supposed good intentions actually were. This is also the first mention of the Termination Bill; Thomas then spends the rest of the novel trying to defeat that bill.
Themes
