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Chapter 7
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Sun Does Shine, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Discrimination and the Criminal Justice System
Optimism, Faith, and Choice
The Death Penalty
Suffering, Community, and Support
The Power of Stories
Summary
Analysis
The next day, on December 17, 1986, the guards retrieve Ray from his cell. He notes that the wealthier men in C block come and go a lot faster than those who are poor. Guys with court-appointed lawyers constantly face delays, and hardly any of them are found innocent. Ray is still in shock from the verdict: he replays some of the other events in his mind. Perhacs told Judge Garrett that a man called him, confessing he was the real killer, but no one hunted the man down. McGregor told the jury that Ray was evil and a cold-blooded killer. Ray doesn’t know why so many people were lying and trying to convict him when the evidence all pointed away from him.
Ray notes the systemic bias again here. Fom his perspective, the criminal justice system is designed to keep poorer people in the prisons and provide so many obstacles that it’s nearly impossible to prove their innocence. Ray also notes that even with someone willing to take responsibility for the crimes, the state refuses to admit it made a mistake and is only concerned with getting a conviction rather than genuinely upholding justice.
Themes
Ray wonders who will take care of his mom now that he won’t be around. He misses Sylvia, wishing that he could smell her skin one more time and feel the sun on his face. He wants his freedom, he wants justice, and he wants to kill McGregor. This knowledge hits him hard and scares him: he doesn’t want to turn into the kind of person who could murder someone, but he imagines wringing McGregor’s neck until he dies.
While the sun becomes a more important symbol later in the book, here Ray establishes its association with freedom and hope. Just to have the basic human experience of feeling the sun is being stripped away from him as a result of a biased criminal justice system, and despair and hatred replace his hope.
Themes
Ray moves to a holding cell, where guards strip-search him and wrap chains around his waist, wrists, and ankles. He feels like a slave as they lead him into the backseat of a van and drive for three hours. As he looks out at the grass and the trees, he wonders if he will ever go out into the countryside again. He feels that God has completely abandoned him.
Here, Ray again emphasizes the bias of the criminal justice system in comparing it to slavery, implying that it is likewise dehumanizing and racist. In addition, Ray emphasizes how the process has caused him to lose both hope and faith in God.
Themes
At Holman prison, Ray barely talks—he refuses to cooperate with the prison guards. He changes into a white prison jumpsuit and gets a medical check-up. When Ray walks down a hall with other inmates, the guards tell the others to turn and face the wall. Ray realizes that they’re doing this because they’re afraid of Ray—as a death row inmate, he’s one of the scariest people in that prison.
Ray begins to cut himself off from others at Holman, where he will serve his time until he is executed. Feeling both without hope and without any support, he further isolates himself from any kind of community and succumbs to despair.
Themes
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The guards lead Ray to a hall marked “Death Row”; they place him and his things in cell number eight. After the guards leave, Ray examines his cell: five feet by seven feet, with a toilet, a sink, and a bed. Ray pulls out his King James Bible and throws it under his bed, thinking that God has left him to die. Laying down on his bed and closing his eyes, Ray feels completely alone. When he wakes, he can hear other inmates screaming in the darkness.
Ray feels completely isolated and without hope, illustrating how the loss of community support can compound a person’s suffering. By throwing his Bible underneath his bed, Ray is rejecting his Christian faith—another indication of his lack of optimism about his situation. The irony is that even though Ray is isolated, he is certainly not the only person on death row feeling hopeless—that outlook is clearly shared by many other inmates as they scream through the night.
Themes
