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Chapter 19
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in One Day, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Relationships and Time
Social Class
Coming of Age and the Search for Meaning
Addiction and Recovery
Summary
Analysis
Friday, July 15, 2005. Dexter tries to overcome his grief for Emma by focusing on the good times and taking people out for dinner on the anniversary of her death. He takes several employees of his café, including his manager Maddy, to basement bar in Camden, where he drinks several cocktails and has a cigarette. When he suggests that they go to a strip club because it’s what Emma would’ve wanted, they finally start saying he should go home. He convinces them to stay for one more drink.
Dexter’s decision to commemorate Emma’s death with his coworkers shows how he has lost touch with other relationships in his life. He is forced to realize that aside from Emma, many of the other relationships he had with people were shallow and based on his own good looks, wealth, and early career success, all of which are less present than they once were.
Themes
London has been tense ever since there was a subway explosion a week ago. Dexter knows that his grief makes him a burden to people around him who have their own lives. And so, he goes to a strip club alone. Dexter expected the strip club to be a funny experience, but it mostly just feels like an airport lounge. He does laugh, however, when he finds out how expensive the drinks are. He blows 100 pounds on terrible Polish champagne. A stripper named Barbara comes over to him and asks him about his day.
Dexter’s insistence that Emma would have wanted him to go to a strip club on the anniversary of her death is an attempt at humor, since he knows how much she disapproved of the scantily dressed cigarette women at the restaurant he took her to dinner years back. But Dexter finds the reality of the strip club less amusing as he realizes the strip club doesn’t offer the promised glamor, a disappointment that he felt often during his reckless days in his youth.
Themes
Dexter speaks incoherently to Barbara about Emma’s death. Her head is down, and Dexter thinks he made her cry, only to see that she is in the middle of sending a text. He gets angry at her for not listening and starts shouting. She starts shouting too, and a bouncer carries Dexter out. It’s only then that he realizes they still have his credit card. Out on the street, Dexter tries to hail a cab, only to realize his wallet and keys are missing too. He fears he’ll have to change the locks on his house, and Sylvie is dropping Jasmine off tomorrow.
Much as Dexter’s inability to process his grief over his mother’s death led him to drink more heavily, his grief over Emma seems to have caused him to relapse and return to drinking for the first time in a while. Dexter finds himself pulled back into old addictive patterns, as he loses his self-control.
Themes
Dexter goes into an old dive bar he remembers going to years ago. He drinks part of a can someone else left behind. A man accuses him of stealing that drink, and he and Dexter get into a fight. He gets knocked down, and then six men throw him out into an alley.
Dexter’s decision to go to a dive bar and pick a fight shows how he continues to depend on alcohol and how it continues to influence him to make bad decisions. The violence that motivates Dexter to fight reflects the extent of the internal pain he is feeling.
Themes
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Dexter receives a letter from Ian, who spoke to Dexter briefly at Emma’s memorial service. He says the years after Emma left him were rough. But then one day, he met another girl and invited her to his stand-up set. She told him he was awful, and so he quit, and now they’ve been married for four years. He now works in insurance and has three kids. He knows Dexter probably doesn’t care about Ian’s life, but he says Emma was an amazing person and he hopes Dexter and Jasmine can be happy one day.
Like Dexter, Ian himself has grown up and matured over the years. What made Dexter and Emma a good couple near the end of Emma’s life was that they knew how to be honest with each other. Emma tried to make her relationship with Ian work by lying to him about the quality of his stand-up, when in fact, what it turns out Ian really needed to grow up was someone to be honest with him about how bad his jokes were.
Themes
When Dexter wakes up, he’s on the floor of his flat and Sylvie is standing over him. He can tell he threw up on himself and apologizes for messing everything up. She says it’s OK and tells Jasmine to wait in the other room because Dexter is feeling sick. The next thing Dexter knows, he’s in a car with his father, who is driving him back to his home. When Dexter arrives at his father’s house, he sees his cut-up face in the mirror and notes how much worse he looks since he’s started drinking again.
Dexter has had his share of differences with both Sylvie and his father, but in this passage, they each show understanding for the grief that he has gone through and don’t judge him for his drinking as they did in the past. This passage shows how getting to know people over time can make them more sympathetic, even when they are as flawed as Dexter.
Themes
Dexter overhears his father on the phone talking about how Dexter’s neighbors let him in after they heard him trying to kick down his own door. Dexter is embarrassed that he still needs his father’s help at 41. Still, he accepts when his father offers him canned soup. The phone rings, and it’s Sylvie. Dexter apologizes to her again. She says she told Jasmine that Dexter has food poisoning and that’s why he can’t see her today. Sylvie reassures Dexter that everyone still loves him.
This passage is one of the first times in the novel that Dexter’s father really tries to take care of him, rather than just admonishing him from a distance. Although Dexter feels embarrassed about still needing this father’s help, this moment of being vulnerable in front of his father seems to open up something new in their relationship.
Themes
Dexter hangs up the phone and joins his father by the television. His father says it’s probably best if he doesn’t turn this type of meltdown into an annual event. Dexter apologizes for causing so much trouble, but his father understands. He says he should try to live as if Emma’s still there—that’s what he’s been doing for the 10 years since Dexter’s mother died. Dexter starts to cry but says he’ll be OK. The two of them watch TV.
Dexter and father realize that as widowers, they have something important in common that is difficult for other people to understand. Dexter’s father once disapproved of Dexter’s TV career, and so the fact that he and Dexter bond over watching TV in this passage reflects how even if they avoid getting too sentimental, they have found common ground with each other.
Themes
