98 pages • 3 hours read
Eden RobinsonSon of a Trickster
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 19-23Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 19 Summary: “Adventures at the All Native”
For two weeks Jared has been staying with various friends, and he goes to the All Native Basketball Tournament with Dylan. Jared wakes up from a black-out in a motel and remembers he was conceived here when Maggie met Phil as a player on one of the teams. Jared decides to hitchhike home, wondering how long his mom will resent him. An old Native woman pulls over for him, and “beneath her face, Jared could see something twisting [...] something in her that was as dark as cedar bark, with large yellowed fangs and knobby, twisted knuckles” (148). Convinced he has taken psychedelics, and while his “inner voice” tells him to run, he makes up excuses not to drive with her. When he returns to the motel, he decides to go home with Dylan, but he drives the truck because Dylan is still drinking.
Jared notices the Native woman’s car at a rest stop, but it is empty when he checks on it. He momentarily leaves his body and sees himself “from the vantage point of someone in the bush, seeing himself lit by the headlights, staring back” (152). He returns home, exhausted and confused, but notices someone cleaned his room. He wonders if he is “sort of, a little, wackadoodle” (155), given what he saw this morning, and his inner voice sarcastically suggests he cut back on drinking. The following day Sarah comes over, and they admit they missed each other these past weeks.
Chapter 20 Summary: “The Human Manual”
The unknown narrator explains that the “human instruction manual” is our DNA, and that “our bodies are transitory vessels built from recycled carbon like every other living being on this planet” (158-9). The narrator suggests that a being might not be human even though it has a human face. The narrator beckons its audience to:
[…] come closer and let me speak to the creatures that swim in your ancient oceans, the old ones that sing to you in your dreams. Encoded memories so frayed you think they’re extinct, but they wait, coiled and unblinking, in your blood and in your bones (159).
Chapter 21 Summary: “Home Alone”
Maggie and Richie disappear again, and by May, they are still gone. Shirley does not let Jared ask Phil for help, so he resorts to taking showers at school and getting his food from the food bank. He senses this is his mom’s form of punishment: “Eye for an eye, bill for a bill” (162). Jared finally asks Nana Sophia if he can stay with her for the summer because it no longer matters what his mother thinks.
Mr. Jaks is in and out of respite care, Mrs. Jaks is struggling with her treatments, and Sarah is having a challenging time adjusting to living with them. One night she stays with Jared, and he smokes weed while she takes acid. He tells Sarah about David, and she admits that she cuts herself, telling him: “I feel numb [...] all the time, like I took sleeping pills and can’t wake up. I just want to feel something” (165). Sarah knows she is high but tells Jared that she “[hears] him all the time” and that his bones are glowing (165-6). After she cuts herself in front of him and they share an intimate moment, she tells Jared about her family. Her family does not acknowledge their Native identity, and she thinks Mr. Jaks has always hated her.
Chapter 22 Summary: “Ragged-Ass Road”
Jared uses his savings to pay the electric bill as the last tenant prepares to move out. It has been four months since Maggie last spoke to Jared. Dylan shows up unexpectedly, inviting him on a road trip. Jared has no desire to go, and they insult each other until Sarah shows up to help him cook dinner. She talks about her sexuality and explains to Jared that she does not believe in monogamy or the gender binary, which confuses Jared. His ignorance frustrates her, and when she leaves angrily, Jared realizes that “if he left the house, no one would miss him” (175). Later that night, Richie and Maggie finally return home with a group of friends to party. When Jared apologizes to her, she says: “You aren’t sorry [...] But you will be” (175).
Chapter 23 Summary: “Doctor Who Marathon”
Maggie keeps silently staring at Jared in the dark, so he spends the night at George’s house. Dylan shows up drunk in the middle of the night wanting to talk to Jared, and his dad comes over to retrieve him. In the morning, Jared helps George’s mom filet salmon to prove himself useful. While Jared grills fish for lunch, a group of crows gather around him and begin to speak. They ask him for some fish and argue amongst themselves before flying towards Jared to steal some salmon from the grill. Thinking he is hallucinating from excessive weed and alcohol, he vows to minimize his drug use for the next few days.
Chapters 19-23 Analysis
When Jared wakes up the weekend of the basketball tournament, he remembers that this is the place his parents met, but he does not know the true story of how he was conceived. In a 2017 interview, Robinson clarifies that Wee’git goes to the tournament, where “he has a crush on a girl who has a crush on someone else. Wee’git transforms himself into that crush and [...] [Jared] was the baby that resulted in the Trickster hookup at the basketball tournament” (Warren, Jennifer. “Why It Took Eden Robinson Eight Years to Write Canada Reads Finalist Son of a Trickster.” CBCnews, 18 Mar. 2020). Though he later finds out that Wee’git is his father, the details of the night at the tournament are never disclosed in this part of the trilogy.
Jared’s experiences with the supernatural become more bizarre and unexplainable: He sees the magic under the skin of the woman who picks him up as he’s hitchhiking (this will turn out to be Jwa’sins, though he does not know who she is the first time he meets her), and he briefly leaves his body again. Jared’s understanding of these incidents is still intrinsically tied to his understanding of sanity, which he begins to question with more frequency: “Did I think that? Am I mental? Did I imagine all that?” (155). The unknown narrator provides some clarity on the nature of human DNA and prominently echoes Granny Nita’s warning from 12 years ago: “you would still trust a human face to be a human” (159). The narrator suggests that even beings that look like humans can contain different “creatures”—something Jared witnessed when he met Jwa’sins. These inklings of magic, whether they appear in ancestral waters (recalling Murchadh, whose mother was a Selkie), or “sing to you in your dreams” (the way Sarah’s fireflies later do) can sometimes remain so deeply hidden that they do not seem to exist at all (159); this is why Maggie always assumed Jared never possessed any powers.
Like Jared, it is impossible for Sarah to distinguish her real, magic visions and experiences from drug-induced hallucinations, especially because she relies on psychedelics to self-medicate the numbness she feels. The numbness is likely a result of her having to repress her magic as a child, just as she had to repress her Native identity. Though more outwardly functional than Jared’s family, Sarah’s family nevertheless still has “to pretend that [they’re] okay, that [they] don’t, secretly, hate [themselves]” (169).
Jared continues to pretend that he is okay, and that his relationship with his mother is okay, even after she abandons him for weeks. His understanding of love and loyalty is so compromised by the addiction and violence he endures that he is willing to forgive Maggie even after this most egregious “lesson.” The fear of irrevocably losing his mother always outweighs the fear of her violence, making for a disturbing and impossible position for a child to be in.
