Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Whale Rider, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Humans and Nature
Maori Identity
Gender and Power
Familial Love
Summary
Analysis
After Kahu goes into the ocean with the ancient whale, Nanny Flowers collapses from shock. She wakes up five days later in the hospital, and immediately asks for Kahu—who is in the next hospital bed over. She was found floating in the ocean three days after her disappearance. Now, she is breathing but in a coma. Nanny Flowers makes the men push her bed next to Kahu’s and then leave her alone with Kahu and Koro Apirana.
In the novel’s final hospital scenes, Kahu and Koro Apirana will finally have the chance to heal their broken relationship and chart a path forward for the community they are both destined to lead. Nanny Flowers’s collapse reflects her deep love for Kahu, whom she thought she was losing to the whales. But Kahu’s survival indicates that the whales released her after realizing she was not Paikea. Accordingly, both communities (the whales and the Maori) have rediscovered a sense of purpose and direction without losing their leaders in the process.
Themes
After a long pause, Koro Apirana announces that he blames himself for everything that has happened. Nanny Flowers agrees that it’s his fault and reminds him of all the times he insisted that women could not hold power, sent Kahu away from the meeting house, and ignored clear signs that she was meant to be the chief. Koro Apirana replies that Nanny Flowers really should divorce him. Suddenly, Kahu sighs and protests: “you two are always arguing.”
After insisting on male supremacy for his entire life, Koro Apirana finally sees how sexism has blinded him to Kahu’s powers, recognizes the error in his ways, and accepts that women can do anything that men can—including serve as chief. Nanny Flowers has spent years (if not decades) trying to demonstrate this to him, so she likely feels vindicated—even if she intentionally doesn’t show it. When she wakes up, Kahu’s first line makes fun of this dynamic: Koro Apirana and Nanny Flowers never stop bickering, despite their love for each other, and even when they agree.
Themes
Meanwhile, in the ocean, the ancient bull whale asks the old mother whale if the whale rider (Kahu) is okay, and she says yes. “Let everyone live,” the ancient whale concludes, “and let the partnership between land and sea, whales and all humankind, also remain.” They sing and break through the surface.
The whales reveal that they did save Kahu, after all. The ancient whale’s proclamation about the whales’ “partnership” with humans is a particularly clear, compelling statement about the importance of the human-nature bond. Namely, he suggests that humans’ and animals’ survival is mutually interdependent, both physically (because otherwise they would kill each other) and spiritually (because their shared existence, intellect, and capacity for love trace back to the same original act of creation). Presumably, Kahu and the ancient whale have started to restore the primordial balance described in the Prologue, which Koro Apirana elsewhere called “the original oneness of the world.”
Themes
