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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
After Joseph Coutts got his law degree, he returned to the land he had surveyed, setting up a practice in the new town of Pluto, North Dakota. As a child, Judge Coutts still lived on the land his grandfather first surveyed. “By drawing a line and defending it, we seem to think we have mastered something,” Coutts reflects. But “the earth swallows and absorbs even those who manage to form a country, a reservation.”
In this essential passage, Coutts suggests that any human attempt to claim or divide the earth into neat plots is fundamentally futile. At the same time, Coutts does still live within the lines his grandfather drew, suggesting that even if such settlement does not indicate “mastery,” it has practical impacts on the present just the same.
Themes
Coutts reflects that everything and everyone in Pluto is connected by blood. To illustrate this point, Coutts discusses a case in which he represented Corwin’s father, John Wildstrand. Coutts wonders whether legal justice is what separates men from wolves. “But what is the difference between the influence of instinct upon a wolf and history upon a man? In both cases,” Coutts think, “justice is prey to unknown dreams.”
On the one hand, like his grandfather, Coutts tries to bring order and justice to his small community. On the other hand, Coutts knows that blood (ancestry) and “dreams” (romantic passion) will always get in the way of such logical thinking. After all, if history is just a series of instinctive decisions, how can the orderly principles of legal justice ever sufficiently respond?
Themes
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