59 pages • 1 hour read
Chris WhitakerAll the Colors of the Dark
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Lasting Effects of Trauma
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes mentions of child abduction, abuse, sexual assault, predatory behavior, mental illness, violence against women, domestic violence, abortion, and suicide.
All the Colors of the Dark traces The Lasting Effects of Trauma on the novel’s main characters. One of the messages Chris Whitaker emphasizes in the novel is the idea that violent events affect many people and their impact ripples outward, lasting for years. One of the characters most impacted by trauma is Patch, whose life is delineated into a “before” and “after” the kidnapping. Though he grows up in a home heavily influenced by poverty and addiction, Patch is still a child at the beginning of the novel. He dresses up like a pirate and imagines an adventurous future: “At thirteen he believed entirely that there was gold beyond the Ozark Plateau […] a brighter world just waiting for him” (3).
After his encounter with Aaron, he thinks “he knew it could not have been so beautiful. That nothing was ever so beautiful in his life” (3). His encounter with violence takes the beauty out of his world. When he is rescued and returned home, he feels alienated from his old life: “Patch’s bedroom was no longer his” (132). He devotes the rest of his life to saving Grace and catching Aaron. Though he does form relationships with others, including Saint, Misty, and his daughter, his relentless pursuit of Grace and his inability to let go of what happened to him frequently disrupt those relationships.
In addition to Aaron’s violence, Saint suffers trauma from Jimmy’s emotional and physical abuse. Though she worked a placement in a unit dealing with domestic violence, she was not prepared for the repercussions of it in her own life. She thinks of her service and remembers “[n]ights spent in the emergency room watching shells of women condemned to a life of eternal shock” (324). When Jimmy physically attacks her, she leaves and divorces him immediately. However, she carries her own “eternal shock” with her throughout her life. She often dreams of the incident and even while working, “She saw in bruises and blood, heard in screams and cries, smelled Jimmy’s cologne so opened the window to drown it” (331). Years later, she confesses to Charlotte what happened, saying “When I lie down to sleep each night, I still feel scared that he’ll come do it again. No matter that I’m a cop. That I carry a gun. I’m scared” (474).
Whitaker uses this incident to reveal the violence hidden in plain sight, perpetuated by men like Jimmy who seem less monstrous and dangerous than Aaron. However, the text shows that both kinds of individuals inflict trauma that leaves survivors forever changed as they must cope with this past violence.
The Search for Identity
As a coming-of-age story, All the Colors of the Dark charts The Search for Identity that its characters undergo as they mature into adulthood and seek to find their place in the world. As children, Patch and Saint see themselves as the pirate and the beekeeper. Patch’s mother “peddled the romance of a cutlass and eye patch because often for kids like him the flair of fiction dulled a reality too severe” (3), and he embraced the identity, including his nickname. After his kidnapping, he leaves behind his childhood pirate identity but becomes a more real-life pirate, roaming the country and robbing banks to fuel his search for Grace.
However, his stint in prison and discovery of Charlotte strip him of this notion: “He was not a pirate. He was a thirty-year-old man with a criminal record” (379). He struggles to reintegrate himself into society and be a parent, telling Saint, “I feel like I’m acting. When I’m being a father, when I’m being a friend. When I make something to eat or take a shower. I’m playing a part in a story deep down you know cannot end well” (427). The author links his unease in these roles to his struggle to understand who he is in the wake of the trauma he suffered. Ultimately, he rescues Grace and goes on the run, living on a sailboat in the Outer Banks. Even though he is wanted by the law, he stays in the US because he still wants to be available to Charlotte if she needs him.
Saint also struggles to find her identity. Ever since she was a child, she eschews traditional gendered expectations and her marriage to Jimmy fails due to the abuse he inflicts. However, she is not entirely comfortable being termed “a lawman” by Patch, either (304). She remembers her childhood beekeeping as a kind of utopia, very different from the life she lives “surrounded by everything bad” (313). Throughout her career, she still chases that peace represented by the “pearl of summer” of her childhood (313). Eventually, Saint finds her identity when she makes her own moral choices, regardless of the law. After hiding Grace and letting Patch go, she thinks, “She knew in her heart what was good and right. She no longer needed her badge for validation” (580).
Women’s Struggle for Autonomy
The author threads the theme of Women’s Struggle for Autonomy, especially regarding their reproductive rights, throughout the novel. The earliest section takes place in 1975, and the reverberations of the Roe v. Wade decision form a backdrop for the characters’ lives. The case also reveals a clash between ideological viewpoints—while Misty and Saint are in favor of a woman’s right to abortion, Norma and the Meyers disapprove of this idea. Saint argues with her grandmother, saying, “We should have total control of our own bodies” and wishing that she could protest in favor of the decision: “I wanted to stand there with Misty and the other girls. I wanted to carry the placard and show my support on the front page of The Tribune” (50).
Norma counters by pointing out that Saint herself was an unwanted pregnancy and asserting that abortion “is a sin” (50). The idea that women are sinning is central to Eli Aaron’s philosophy as well. Saint says to Tooms, “That’s how he chose them. He was doing God’s work. He chose penitent sinners. The pregnant girls who came to you for an abortion” (541). The nun Saint speaks to points out that Aaron’s alias references the Old Testament figure Eli, son of Aaron. Aaron believes he is fit to judge the decisions girls and women in his community make about their bodies, undercutting their autonomy. He targeted Misty because he saw her in The Tribune at the protest. When perusing old records of missing girls, Patch thinks that the victims were “[m]ostly too young to realize they were birthmarked with targets that only boldened with time, invisible to begin with, taking shape through formative years and burning red hot through puberty and into their teens” (139). Their femininity is a target in the face of misogyny that marks them for exploitation and violence at the hands of dangerous men.
Aaron connects to other characters in the book who also attempt to judge and control women. When Saint visits the clinic in the city, she thinks about the anti-abortion protestors: “a couple of men who laid claim to women and their bodies like rapists champing at a noble cause. Your body, my choice” (319). Jimmy similarly sees Saint as his property and blames her career for ruining their lives and marriage. Throughout her life, Saint feels pressure to conform to gendered ideals of women’s behavior. Her grandmother urges her to marry Jimmy and cater to him, telling her that all men need “tending.” As a young woman, Saint knows that people in Monta Clare saw her as:
[a] poor girl who had no sense of style, or femininity, no chance of finding a boy and then a man. A girl who looked to books for answers to questions that would never be asked of her. Weighed questions that had nothing to do with fashion or baking or making a goddamn motherfucking home (39).
People even judge women like Misty and Ivy, who conform to certain ideals of beauty, for being too poor, “provocative,” or outspoken. Due to the pressure they face, Saint and Misty nurture and strive to raise Charlotte to be free from much of this pressure, encouraging her to pursue an education and her interests without prioritizing others’ expectations.
