logo

70 pages 2 hours read

William Kent Krueger

Ordinary Grace

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2013

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Symbols & Motifs

The Church Basement Air Ducts

The church basement air ducts are used on multiple occasions as a way for Frank Drum, among others, to eavesdrop on conversations his father, Nathan, has with others in the New Bremen community. This ability to listen without being seen is a common one for Frank throughout the novel; we see it happen in this context and we see it happen many times in the Drum house, where Frank listens to his father speak on the phone to someone or have a conversation with his wife and/or others in the downstairs of their home. The air duct, for Frank, ties in to his coming-of-age; two of the conversations he hears via the duct deal with sexuality; there is, first, the relationship counseling the Sweeneys receive from Nathan, and, secondly, there is Karl Brandt’s admission that he is gay. If the age-old adage is that children should be seen and not heard, here, we have Frank, who has entered adolescence, hearing adult conversations without being seen. 

The Train Trestle and River

A sizable number of important events happen on or near the trestle that passes over the river: Bobby Cole’s death; Frank’s sighting of Redstone with the corpse of the Skipper; Frank finding Redstone hiding on the trestle, after he’s implicated in Ariel’s death; Ruth Drum’s late-night, existentially-driven walk; and Frank’s sighting of Ariel’s corpse all being among them. In many ways, the trestle works as a sort of anti-church, teaching Frank secular, real-world lessons that seem to run counter to the spiritual teachings his father sermonizes every Sunday. If church is a place where Frank listens (both among its pews and in the basement), the trestle is a place where Frank sees. The trestle is literally manmade, and offers a viewpoint out on to the nature of the world, both literally and figuratively.

That nature is symbolized in the novel by the river and riverbank. The river literally flows under humankind’s creation (the trestle), provides sustenance to those who know how to use it (Redstone’s fishing), offers an example or way of the white man’s corruption of nature (Doyle blowing up the bullfrog) and is ambiguous toward the morbid and criminal acts of humans (Lise Brandt dumping Ariel’s corpse in the river). 

Warren Redstone’s Tin Can

Functioning as something akin to an ad hoc time capsule, Redstone’s collection of things, which he keeps in a tin can buried in the sand in his riverbank lean-to, symbolize Anglo, capitalist society, and how out of step materialism is with the natural world. The inclusion of the Playboy magazine can be viewed as an objectification of women, out of accordance with the natural order of things. The broken Mickey Mouse watch illustrates established Anglo-American cultural iconography as no longer functional. The ceramic frog serves as a symbol of nature recast and echoes Anglo authority figure Officer Doyle’s wanton and needless killing of the bullfrog via Fourth of July fireworks. Another item in the tin can, Redstone’s Purple Heart, which he assumedly attained through service in World War One, is given no special credence or hierarchy—indeed, the war medal is just another thing from an Anglo culture he is, at best, marginally part of.

Two other items—Bobby Cole’s glasses and Ariel’s necklace—also wind up in Redstone’s possession, and, by extension, may be considered part of the group of things Redstone keeps in his tin can. Redstone uses the dead boy’s glasses to read a letter delivered by the Postal Service, a branch of the U.S. government. Redstone uses the spectacles of a white kid with Aryan features to help read correspondence delivered by a white mail carrier who services the white town populated by ancestors of those white settlers slaughtered Redstone’s ancestors, after starving and deceiving the Dakota Sioux. Ariel Drum’s necklace has even less practical value for Redstone; instead, he simply finds it and holds on to it. The necklace, of course, has much meaning for the Drum family, part of the novel’s Anglo, hetero and Christian majority, and were it not for Frank letting Redstone goes, it’s implied by Frank that Redstone would have almost surely have been wrongly indicted for Ariel’s murder.

Collectively, then, the items in Redstone’s can symbolize cultural coding through materialism—while the Anglo majority of New Bremen would view all of these items in a largely-similar way, Redstone, non-Anglo, places them in his can and out of context, bringing to the foreground the fact that such items do not hold a universally-analogous meaning for all people. 

blurred text
blurred text
blurred text
blurred text