56 pages • 1 hour read
Michael BlakeDances with Wolves
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1988A 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 Call of the Frontier
For First Lieutenant John Dunbar, the lure of the West runs deep. Offered a choice of assignments as a reward for heroism, he opts for a remote outpost on the frontier. Dunbar wants to see that world in its pristine form before it disappears forever under the wagon wheels and hoof prints of advancing civilization. What he finds transforms him. The Great Plains is a new world for the lieutenant, a place that brims with beauty, fascination, and, perhaps most importantly, wildness. This sense of things untamed calls out to Dunbar’s soul.
For the settlers who kill wantonly, the wildness they seek comes from their own untamed, self-indulgent, and violent urges that are suddenly given their head in a land free of the restrictions of civilization. These settlers become wild and destructive. Unlike them, Dunbar is respectful of the prairie and its residents. The wildness in his character isn’t an undisciplined wantonness but a wellspring of spontaneity, compassion, and intense love for nature, feelings he finally can express freely on the frontier. He doesn’t kill things needlessly nor disrespect them by misusing or squandering their blessings.
In response, the prairie welcomes him. Its first emissary is Two Socks, the wolf who chooses Dunbar as a companion and finds ways to play freely with his new human friend. The peaceful river, the warm sun, and the coolly radiant moon also seem to offer up their beauty for his admiration and respect.
The Comanche people emerge from this vast world and become emissaries as well. Despite the risks they face—Dunbar is for them a kind of wild danger that has appeared on their own horizon—they accept the white soldier into their lives. As much as the Comanche represent for Dunbar a strange new wonder in the wilderness, Dunbar is for them equally strange and wondrous. This mutual reaching-out, despite the wild uncertainties, pays off for both, and together they thrive.
At first, “He did not think of becoming an Indian” (177), but, drawn more deeply into their culture, Dunbar finally transforms into Dances With Wolves. In the process, he discovers that it isn’t so much wildness itself as the opportunity hidden within it. He must visit places that, to him, seem wild to find what he hasn’t found in the tameness of his old world—the experience of deep connection to others. The beauties and wonders of the wilderness thus pull back to reveal the profundity of love and companionship. For Dunbar/Dances With Wolves, the frontier no longer is wild; instead, the wildness in his heart finds a true home.
The Warrior’s Challenge
With much battle experience gained during the Civil War, Lieutenant Dunbar leads a charge that energizes his men, and they rout the opposing Confederate soldiers. Privately, Dunbar knows his own participation was suicidal; luck protected him and gave him a second opportunity to live. He understands how to be brave in the world of the white soldier, but he doesn’t know if he can live up to the challenges that await him beyond the frontier. The people he meet will test him; he must learn what they seek so that he can prove himself to them.
He encounters Comanche at his fort and, naked and unarmed, confronts them, even though they threaten him with weapons. He decides to visit their village, and, on the way, encounters one of their women, Stands With A Fist, bleeding to death on the prairie, and brings her back to her Comanche people. This good deed, coupled with Dunbar’s courage in risking it, impresses the villagers.
Dunbar joins the Comanche in their hunt and kills buffalo with them. He recalls this first hunt comically, enduring their laughter at his foibles: “Lieutenant Dunbar didn’t mind. He was laughing, too” (178). This, too, is a form of courage: Men test each other with taunts and teasing to see what they’re made of, and Dunbar is built of strong stuff made stronger by a natural humility.
When Pawnee threaten the village, Dunbar/Dances With Wolves rides through a fierce thunderstorm to bring his adopted people the guns that will help them defeat their attackers. During the battle, he kills several of the enemy, one in hand-to-hand combat. He also works tirelessly to learn the Comanche language and culture. He is unfailingly polite and considerate toward Stands With A Fist, and his eventual romance with her is supported by all.
When captured by the Army, Dances With Wolves aids his rescuers by killing two of his captors. At the winter camp, he tells the elders that he will leave them so they won’t be harmed by the soldiers who will come there in search of him. Ten Bears dissuades him, saying he has become so much a Comanche warrior that the soldiers will never recognize him.
During each of these events, it isn’t his bravery that impresses the Comanche as much as his willingness to risk himself to assist them. His determined attitude of service bonds them to him. Dances With Wolves has met the warrior’s challenge—not simply to be brave, but to put his life at the service of the village; that is the true heroism.
The Way of the Comanche
Dunbar is drawn to his Comanche neighbors, not simply for their exotic contrast to his own life, but for their disciplined ways, their careful use of resources, and their sense of community. Each of these traits differs distinctly from the white culture, and each represents a way of life Dunbar finds superior to his old world.
The Comanche live in a realm beset by challenge and risk. To survive harsh winters, avoid starvation, and fend off enemies, they must lead lives that live up to demanding standards. The buffalo hunt requires close coordination between men who can shoot well while riding among the charging, panicked bovines without getting injured or killed. Buffalo-hunting skills and attitudes also serve in warfare against the band’s enemies. The Comanche strategize carefully, planning their moves against, for example, the hated Pawnee, and alter their tactics to suit whatever situation or landscape becomes the place in which the battle is to be fought.
The women must coordinate closely to process the meat, hides, and bones before scavengers can ruin them: “at each body families set up portable factories that worked with amazing speed and precision in transforming animals into usable products” (177). The buffalo provide the main food source as well as hides for clothing and lodges, along with bones and sinew for sewing and other uses. All parts are used; none are wasted. In this way, the Comanche live in harmony with their surroundings. They take what they need and no more. They are respectful of the resources that give them life.
White settlers, on the other hand, show little respect for the prairie aside from its economic use. They shoot animals almost at random, picking off a few good parts to eat or wear and throwing the rest away. This approach disgusts both the Comanche and Dunbar.
The villagers must work closely together to build their houses, make clothing, and cook food. As a nomadic group, they know how to break camp and move quickly as a unit, both to take advantage of the buffalo where they graze and to avoid attacks from outsiders. Their system of governance is managed by a group of elders, but anyone in the band can bring up an issue with the chief or his aides and get a hearing.
Though the whites also adhere to a complex system of governance, theirs is a world of individuals who tend to go their own way in search of personal dreams. While this has its advantages—the Americans have prospered greatly, their technology advances rapidly, and they expand westward as their population burgeons—such a way of life can be spendthrift, isolating, and even brutal, especially toward those who cannot defend themselves from the overwhelming flow of newcomers into the frontier territories.
The Comanche, on the other hand, share a deep sense of community and commitment to one another. Their life purpose centers around the village and its needs: “Service was how they controlled the fragile destiny of their lives” (177). There is a certain amount of competition among the men and women, but the great balance of their efforts serves the group as a whole. It is this sense of community and dedication to a common cause that inspires Dunbar to walk away from the isolating experience of the white civilization, join instead the Comanche’s world, and become Dances With Wolves.
