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77. Motherless
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Out of the Dust, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Nature, Survival, and the Dust Bowl
Poverty, Charity, and Community
Coming of Age
Family and Forgiveness
Summary
Analysis
Haydon P. Nye’s wife dies of dust pneumonia two months after Mr. Nye dies. Despite the official cause, Billie Jo believes she died because life was too hard without her husband. Billie Jo thinks about how she wanted to die after her mother’s death. She doesn’t feel like that anymore. However, she wants to go somewhere else, “out of the dust.”
Although Billie Jo wants to go “out of the dust,” doing so will not fix her loneliness problem, which is what she believes Mrs. Nye died from. Although she might move to somewhere safer than the Panhandle, new scenery will not fix the hole her mother’s death left in her heart.
Themes
