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The Chippewa Scholar
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
Vera has been sick for as long as she can remember, locked in a room where men enter and “use her body,” all day and night. The cook’s assistant, who’s supposed to take care of her, is using what she needs for himself. Now she’s in perpetual agony. Her brain throbs in her skull. She “foamed and shat herself.” Things get so bad that they dress her in a dead man’s clothes and drop her, unconscious, at the end of an alley in Duluth.
This is the first time when the reader begins to understand what Vera has been going through. It seems that she has been sold into a kind of sexual slavery on a ship. It also seems that the people profiting off of her can maintain control over her in part because they have made sure she became addicted to drugs; by being the ones who control when she can get those drugs. When the cook’s assistant begins using the drugs allotted for her for himself, though, Vera goes through withdrawal, where she “foamed and shat herself,” which still doesn’t stop men on the ship from “using her body.” Eventually, though, they abandon her in an alley in Duluth. Vera’s whole story is the diametric opposite of Thomas’s story. While Thomas sees injustice and mobilizes the community to oppose it, the people who came into contact with Vera committed every kind of injustice without regard for her humanity, and not a single person stood up to stop it.
Themes
