The Dew Breaker By Edwidge Danticat: An Analysis

Often times, life challenges the strongest people when they are faced with trauma and tests whether they have the ability to find a way to move on. When faced with the traumatic challenges of life, even people who have suffered the most cannot obtain closure as an absolute end to their suffering. Closure does not exist in recovery when it is defined as a sense of resolution or conclusion, but this permanent action of “moving on” is an extremely unrealistic standard. In the book, The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat, most of the characters strive to move on from the trauma caused by the dew breaker who hurt them. The nonfiction sources, “Analysis: Closure, a moment of uncertainty and a beginning of a struggle between what remains and what is

In the story “Night Talkers” the main character Dany looks to seeking revenge as a possible outlet and way to obtain closure to end the pain the dew breaker caused when he hurt his family, changing Dany’s life. After going to visit his caretaker and aunt in Haiti, he meets another boy dealing with his own distress, and gains a new perspective of what it is like to move on. Based on this person, Dany recognizes that Claude was, “a night talker, one of those who spoke their nightmares out loud to themselves…He was able to speak his nightmares to himself as well as to others, in the night times as well as in the hours past dawn…” (Danticat 120). This quote shows how Dany realizes that there is no such thing as completely moving on or being able to forget his past, and what the dew breaker did to his family. This includes the understanding that part of recovery comes from acceptance, rather than from an eternal end to his pain, the way he believed he could get closure through retaliation. Raymond Gozzi Jr. believes that closure is misinterpreted and rather

Many people identify closure as an end, a conclusion, or a resolution, when in fact it should be something that is understood, accepted, and lived with. In the chapter, “The Dew Breaker,” Anne, the wife of the dew breaker, still regrets the traumatic death of her brother at the hands of her own husband. She goes on to say, “There was no way to escape this dread anymore...this fright that the most important relationships of her life were always on the verge of being severed or lost, that the people closest to her were always disappearing...These spirits, they’d left her for good... leaving behind no corpse to bury, no trace of himself at all” (Danticat 242). This suggests that Anne may never be able to forgive her husband and obtain closure from her brother’s death. She knows that she has to live with the grief that she feels for the rest of her life because of the decision she made. As much as people wish this was true, it simply cannot be, because this would imply that the person would never feel the pain, as if the moment never meant anything to them other that a