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Summary
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Plague of Doves, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Ancestry, History, and Interconnection
Punishment vs. Justice
Land, Ownership, and Dispossession
Passion vs. Love
Faith, Music, and Meaning
Summary
Analysis
An unnamed man prepares to take his “last shot,” but his gun gets jammed up. Next to him a baby, still in its crib, begins to wail. To soothe his nerves as he repairs his gun, the man turns on the room’s record player. The record already on the spindle begins to play, and the “unearthly violin solo” that fills the room calms the baby. The baby falls asleep, and the man successfully fixes his gun. As the violin reaches its crescendo, the man again raises his gun. “The odor of raw blood was all around him in the closed room.”
This intentionally confusing opener introduces the event that will haunt the rest of the narrative. Someone has just committed a series of murders (signified by the fact that the unnamed killer is about to take his “last shot” of many), and the sole survivor of these killings is a young baby. This passage also sets up one of the narrative’s most crucial symbols—violin music, which often acts as a gateway to spiritual power and “unearthly” truth.
Themes
