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Chapter 12
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Winter’s Bone, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Silence and Secrets
Family, Destiny, and Inheritance
Violence and Decay
Isolation and Independence
Women and Matriarchy
Summary
Analysis
Ree continues her walk home; all the while, ice and snow melt all around her. Ree pauses on a bridge that delivers her passage across a frozen creek and looks down over the edge of it, trying to see beneath the ice. She realizes that her “eyes [are unconsciously] search[ing] for a body.” Ree falls to her knees and cries.
Ree reckons with the fact that her father’s death is an increasingly likely possibility. Her realization that the expectation of violence is so ingrained in her is devastating and, in a way, shameful to her.
Themes
