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Book 2, Chapter 1
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
The villagers call her Water Claire and, in the weeks after her arrival, they bring her gifts like a petticoat and a comb. Lame Einar, to everyone’s surprise, gives her a gift: a woven hat. Claire spends much of the summer staring out at the sea, but she doesn’t know what she’s waiting for: her memories are all gone. Alys figures she’s about 16 and, hearing this and watching children playing in the meadow, Claire is sad. Her “meadow days” are gone. But Tall Andras hears that she’s 16 and just wants to marry her. He’s annoyed when Alys and Old Benedikt tell him that Claire can’t marry until she remembers her past.
Einar, it’s implied, isn’t one for giving gifts—but somehow, Claire is special and he’s therefore willing to step outside of his comfort zone to help her. Claire is sad about having lost her memories of her “meadow days” (by which the novel means an innocently spent childhood), but readers know that Claire didn’t really have “meadow days” like that—she spent her life training to enter her community as a working adult, not playing.
Themes
Alone with each other, Old Benedikt and Alys discuss Claire and how she remembers nothing. The two old people have been friends for 60 years. Alys is busy collecting raspberry leaf to brew a tea for Bryn, Bethan’s mother, who’s pregnant again after three miscarriages. Hopefully, the tea will help her keep this pregnancy. When Old Benedikt asks if there’s an herb Alys can give Claire to help her memory, she gives him a piece of bark and tells him to think back to any memory of his choosing. He describes a memory of dancing with Alys when they were about 13, but he can’t remember why they were dancing. Laughing, Alys turns away and says the bark doesn’t actually do anything: all a person has to do to remember is try. Claire will remember at some point.
Another difference appears between this village and Claire’s original community: Bryn is apparently pregnant on purpose, and she’s struggling to carry a pregnancy to term. Here, babies are wanted—by their biological parents, not by a faceless Committee of Elders that just wants to see the community continue to exist by continually producing new generations. Alys suggests that Claire has experienced a lot of trauma, even if they don’t know what that is (aside from the trauma of having lost her memory). Their job, she insists, is to support Claire and give her the safe space to figure out who she is.
Themes
