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Chapter 5: December 8, 2000
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in We Need to Talk About Kevin, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Guilt and Accountability
Marriage, Family, and Social Norms
Nature vs. Nurture
Idealism vs. Reality
Forgiveness and Empathy
Summary
Analysis
Back in the present, Eva is visiting Kevin in prison. He asks her if she wanted to have him. Eva replies that she thought she did, and that Franklin definitely did. Eva thinks that Kevin’s question reveals that he has empathy for her. Eva tells Kevin that raising him was very difficult. Kevin, in response, insults Eva and Franklin’s career choices, and Eva snaps that no one would want a child like him. Eva notes that Kevin has always tempted her to be cruel to him, but he doesn’t react to her response now. Eva thinks that while Kevin has high self-esteem, he is not happy.
Eva may not always be a reliable narrator, and her psychoanalysis of Kevin sometimes seems flawed. Here, she perceives Kevin as confident, but at other points in the novel it seems more likely that Kevin doesn’t show Eva his true feelings and insecurities. Eva thinks that Kevin wants her to be cruel to him, but she may simply be looking for ways to avoid admitting to her cruelty.
Themes
Eva remembers how, early in her pregnancy, she and Franklin argued about what to name their son. Franklin wants to use a traditional name, but Eva prefers something unique. Eva wants her son to take her last name in order to defy patriarchal norms, and also to carry on her Armenian last name (Khatchadourian) to honor Armenian history. She thinks Franklin’s last name, Plaskett, sounds too American. After Kevin’s murders, Eva realizes that wanting to use her last name is a privileged perspective—when hardship affects her personally, she tries to hide it.
The history Eva refers to is the Armenian genocide that killed much of her extended family during World War I. Eva prides herself on being worldly, but this often comes off as arrogant, since she is anti-American yet is American herself. This disagreement between Eva and Franklin also highlights how different their fundamental values are. Franklin holds the exact traditional American values that Eva resents.
Themes
Eva is disappointed when she finds out she’s having a boy. Boys used to bully her when she was a child, and she has always been afraid of teenage boys, disliking the way they show off for one another and harass girls and women. Franklin, on the other hand, is delighted to learn that the baby is a boy—the news seems to make him feel that the baby is more his than Eva’s. Franklin starts to try to control Eva’s actions more and more. Franklin sees Eva dancing one day, and he tells her she shouldn’t dance while pregnant. The two of them argue, and Eva sarcastically remarks that she shouldn’t listen to the Talking Heads song “Psycho Killer” while pregnant in case it influences the fetus. Eva tells Franklin that she regrets becoming pregnant, which enrages Franklin.
Franklin and Eva’s opposing values divide the couple more over time. They don’t agree on how Eva should act during pregnancy, which foreshadows the disagreements they’ll have about how to raise their child later on. Eva is joking when she remarks that she shouldn’t listen to “Psycho Killer” while she is pregnant, alluding to the dated misbelief that the music one listens to while pregnant influences one’s baby’s development (i.e., Mozart makes babies smarter). Of course, the irony is that Eva’s joke foreshadows Kevin eventually becoming a mass murderer.
Themes
