Previous
Book 2, Chapter 3
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Son, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Pain and Maternal Love
Travel, Fitting In, and Values
Emotion, Individuality, and the Human Experience
Family and Coming of Age
Community and Sacrifice
Summary
Analysis
Claire is terrified of animals, whether it’s a mouse in Alys’s hut or Eira, Bethan, and Delwyth’s tamed chipmunk. The scariest animal for her is the scrawny milk cow. One day, she tells Alys that she needs to learn to not be afraid of animals. Alys suggests she may have had a bad experience with an animal, but Claire is fairly sure she’s just never seen them before—except for fish. Alys says she’ll ask Lame Einar to catch them a bird to keep as a pet.
Readers know that Claire is right: she worked with and is familiar with fish, but her community “didn’t have mammals” anymore and so she’s genuinely never seen something as innocuous as a mouse. Still, Claire is developing and knows she must learn and grow, which is why she insists on learning and conquering her fears.
Themes
Claire is on the beach with Delwyth, Bethan, and Eira. The girls are playing house by outlining one in sticks. Claire picks up a stick and writes her name in the sand. She’s shocked, then, when she has to explain to Bethan that she wrote her name and what letters are. Bethan has never heard of school. Claire decides that maybe school and learning to write one’s name isn’t important or necessary. She lets the water wash away her name. Back at Alys’s hut, Lame Einar approaches with a twig birdcage containing a little songbird. Einar doesn’t talk much, as he’s ashamed of his failure to climb out of the village. So he leaves the bird and hobbles away.
In this passage, Claire symbolically allows the water—nature and chaos—to wash away her former identity as Claire, a Birthmother-turned-Hatchery-employee who knew how to write her name. As she does so, she begins to move forward developmentally, considering more purposefully who and what she’d like to be. Like Claire, Einar is haunted by a perceived failure, but here, everyone knows about it—and it's not clear if this makes it harder or easier for Einar to process what happened.
Themes
When Claire returns from the beach and finds the bird, she confirms that it can’t get out. Alys, laughing, says it’ll be Claire’s responsibility to feed the bird seeds and bugs. As Claire studies the bird, she declares it needs a name—though she insists to Alys that she’s never named anything before. Then, she asks Alys to tell her the color of the bird’s wing. Privately, Alys is worried about this. All children learn colors when they’re little, but Claire has never heard of them before. Alys tells her the bird’s wing is yellow, and Claire names the bird Yellow-wing.
Readers who have read The Giver will remember that in Claire and Jonas’s original community, people don’t see color (Jonas does because of what he learns from the Giver). Claire hasn’t learned her colors because where she comes from, they seemingly don’t exist—and so they’re new and exciting for her.
Themes
One morning, once Claire has gotten used to the bird, she climbs the hill to thank Lame Einar for it. He brushes off her thanks, and Claire suddenly realizes that Einar is lonely. She asks to sit and tells him that the bird is helping her. She used to be afraid of them, but now she’s learning about birds and colors. And now, Yellow-wing sings for her. Einar mimics the bird’s song, but when Claire asks if he can mimic other birds, he hurries away to tend to his sheep. From afar, he calls to Claire that Yellow-wing needs greens to eat.
Just as Claire realized that she was lonely in her original community, she recognizes the same emotion in Einar. And now, outside of the rules that constrained her and in a more supportive, feeling place, Claire understands that the remedy for loneliness is friendship—and she begins to offer this to Einar. Additionally, she doesn’t seem to judge Einar or hold his disability against him, thereby showing him what is perhaps some much needed compassion.
Themes
Get the entire Son LitChart as a printable PDF.
Sometime later, Alys and Old Benedikt are watching the villagers prepare for a wedding. They notice Tall Andras watching Claire, who’s helping with the flowers, and they discuss that Claire is afraid of animals and doesn’t know her colors. These things are shocking to them.
Old Benedikt and Alys still aren’t able to conceive of a girl who has never heard of color before. Claire perhaps doesn’t fit in here due to not knowing about color—but she also has the capacity to learn and integrate more fully into the community.
Themes
