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
Vera finds herself walking and thinks she’s on the journey to the next life. As she sees signs—Highway 2, Firewood For Sale—she begins to suspect that she’s still alive. But she’d been dead when she’d been alive, she thinks. She’s sure of that.
Vera becomes aware of her surroundings again, but she also knows that she had been dead while she had been alive, meaning that what had happened to her had destroyed her spirit, that even though scientifically she might have been alive, her soul had effectively died.