Humor and Pain Theme Analysis

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 Termination Bill and Arthur Watkins might “cost him everything.” Instead of delving into those emotions, when Louis and Thomas see each other for the first time, they joke with one another. Thomas asks Louis if he’s down in the city because his horses got out again, and Louis says he’s there to bring Thomas back in grand style, with a red carpet laid out to Juggie’s car.

Similarly, after Patrice has been essentially kidnapped, witnessed disturbing scenes at the addresses where she had checked for Vera, and is about to be lowered into the tank to be the waterjack (all of which happens in one day), she looks for humor in the situation. Specifically, she aims to locate a kind of feeling and thinking that could “only be described in Chippewa,” where the “strangeness was also humorous” and the danger became something “you might laugh at,” all while knowing you could be hurt and that the potential damage could be devastating. With that in mind, it’s notable that one of Arthur Watkins’s most damning qualities is that he has “no sense of humor,” which Thomas finds even more frightening than the Mormon bible. Thomas also points out how the exploits of the figure Nanabozho (a trickster figure in Chippewa folklore) differ from the Mormon bible, considering how Nanabozho created “everything useful and much that was essential, like laughter.” This perspective suggests that humor can transform pain into something more manageable, while a lack of humor can lead a person to harm and dehumanize others.