The Night Watchman

The Night Watchman

by

Louise Erdrich

Themes and Colors
Power, Solidarity, and Community Action Theme Icon
Oppression and Supposed Good Intentions Theme Icon
Humor and Pain Theme Icon
Sex, Violence, and Gender Theme Icon
Agency and Exploitation Theme Icon
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

Time after time, when the characters in The Night Watchman confront conflicts, they respond with solidarity to overcome them. When people in power try to enforce their will on others, the most effective way those people can fight back, the novel seems to suggest, is through collective action. For example, when Patrice forgets to cook her bread and has nothing to eat for lunch, the community of people she works with steps in to give…

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Oppression and Supposed Good Intentions

Much of the brutality depicted in The Night Watchman is done by people who claim, and by some who might believe, that they are acting for the good of the people they harm. When Patrice travels to Minneapolis, a stranger almost kidnaps her, and then Jack Malloy steps in to “help.” Jack offers to do whatever she wants and takes her to the addresses she has written down to try and find her missing sister…

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Humor and Pain

When confronted with pain and suffering, characters in the novel often use humor as a way to get through it. After Thomas has had a stroke, Louis comes to the hospital to pick him up. Louis feels guilty because he thinks that if he had gone on the trip to Washington, Thomas might not have been so overworked and might not have had a stroke. Thomas, for his part, feels like this battle against the…

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Sex, Violence, and Gender

Sex often, though not always, goes hand in hand with violence in the novel. This violence is almost always, if not always, committed by men against women. The summer before the events of the novel, Bucky Duvalle, with the help of his friends, attempts to rape Patrice. She eventually gets away by swimming to Thomas’s boat in the middle of the lake, but not before she suffers scratches, bruises, and a bite…

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Agency and Exploitation

When Patrice talks with Betty Pye about sex, Betty says that sometimes men come to the reservation, tell women they want to get married, then “ditch the woman, [and] sell her to someone who puts them out for sex.” This seems to be what happened to Vera. And by the time Vera actually appears in the novel, she is trapped in the hold of a ship, and it seems like she has been sold…

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