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Book 2, Chapter 3
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Dawn, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Humanity, Evolution, and Genetics
Motherhood and Leadership
Consent and Autonomy
Sexuality and Gender
Summary
Analysis
Lilith wants to find another human to talk to. She also wants to catch one of the Oankali in the lie. With seemingly no other humans around, Nikanj becomes her best option. Still, she feels like an animal test subject and that only another human could understand the feeling. Nikanj has a photographic memory and can recall almost anything—Sharad was the same way.
Although the significance of Sharad’s photographic memory isn’t clear at the moment, later, it will become apparent that Sharad must have undergone genetic modifications with the Oankali, as Lilith herself will eventually do. As a child, Sharad would have little ability to comprehend and consent to such an invasive procedure, once again raising questions about the ethics of what the Oankali are doing.
Themes
Lilith asks Nikanj if he can read and write, but he doesn’t even understand the concept, so Lilith teaches him. Lilith asks for paper to write on, but Nikanj turns her down, saying this is forbidden for humans. When Nikanj goes to get food, Lilith slips away. Nikanj comes to find her, but from then on, Lilith tries to be alone. Nikanj eventually gets used to this and gives Lilith an address that she can tell anyone if she ever wants to get back to where Jdahva lives. While wandering, Lilith learns the Oankali word for human—kaizidi—and hears a reference to a human named Fukumoto who is associated with a family called Tiej.
Writing is an essential part of both creating and documenting human culture, and the Oankali ban on writing seems to be a deliberate attempt to prevent humans from forming a new culture. While the Oankali claim that they are only trying to prevent humans from returning to the violent ways that nearly destroyed the species the first time, preventing writing (and related practices like book-burning) carry associations with oppressive human governments. This raises the question of whether the Oankali are really so different from an oppressive human regime.
Themes
Lilith goes to Tiej on her own without telling Jdahya or the others. She wanders for a while through forest areas and buries some orange peelings in a shallow hole, to feed them to the ship as Nikanj instructed her earlier. Eventually, she finds two Oankali that seem to speak Japanese. She asks about Fukumoto. But they are too distracted, looking at a bubbling orange mass in the ground where Lilith buried her orange peels. Lilith asks for help with the growing orange spot, and at last, Kahguyaht shows up and helps. It scolds Lilith for traveling too far away, saying that one should only bury food waste in certain parts of the ship.
The Oankali act as if Lilith has more freedom now that she’s outside of her isolation room, but as she learns when she buries the orange peel in the wrong place, there are still strict limits on where she can go and what she can do. The chaos that Lilith creates with such a simple action suggests that Oankali society may not be as logical and orderly as they claim in their conversations with Lilith.
Themes
Kahguyaht can tell Lilith is looking for information about Fukumoto, so she tells her that Fukumoto just recently died, after living on the ship for over 60 years. Lilith thinks it was cruel to make Fukumoto live so long without human contact, but Kahguyaht says that if Lilith learns the Oankali language, she might soon be able to meet another human.
Lilith never got a chance to meet Fukumoto and so has no idea what he thought of his time on the ship. The logic-based Kahguyaht tries to measure they quality of Fukumoto’s life in the number of years that he lived. By contrast, Lilith cares more about the quality of his life in ways that are harder to quantify with numbers.
Themes
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