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Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.
The Cyclical Trap of Violence
Throughout the novel, characters are trapped within a cycle of violence that is difficult to escape. Violence begets violence in Will’s world, as each murder leads to another and another in a chain of pain and loss. The Rules serve to codify the cycle of violence, requiring that each murder leads to another murder. The prohibition against snitching means that the community does not rely on the police to address murder, and it’s implied that this is because the police have not proven themselves to be trustworthy protectors or arbiters of justice. As a result, a system of vigilante justice prevails instead, and this justice takes the form of violence. What’s more, because the community is denied more traditional forms of advancement, many people find themselves caught up in gang life.
For example, Uncle Mark struggles to find a more traditional or legal way to make money to earn his camera to make films but finds that his only recourse is to sell drugs on the corner. For a community that has been systemically oppressed, extralegal activities provide a reliable source of income and many in Will’s community and family join gangs to earn money and find protection. As a result, the gangs perpetrate violence and ensnare innocents in their turf wars. The combination of violence-based community rules, lack of support from civic institutions, systematic oppression, and gang proliferation means that the people in Will’s community again and again struggle to escape the clutches of violence.
The Disorienting Power of Grief
Through the novel, characters struggle with the massive grief created by the cycle of violence and struggle to find clarity in the fog of their mourning. In the beginning of the novel, Will describes the shock of his brother’s death, noting that he struggles to even say that his brother has died. Just two days after his brother’s death, Will’s pain and grief are fresh, as illustrated by his use of the tooth metaphor. Will describes grief in terms of a stranger ripping a tooth out of the back of one’s mouth and the pain and bewilderment of searching the socket with one’s tongue. This parallels how the loss of Shawn is a loss of a part of Will’s self and illustrates that Will is still searching for his brother, unable to fully accept that he is gone. The sense that something essential is missing is palpable. It’s in this atmosphere that Will attempts to make the life-changing decision about whether or not to commit murder in order to get revenge for Shawn’s death.
Unable to see clearly himself, Will, instead, is guided by the dead, who meet him within his grief to dissuade him from the destructive path he’s on. The dead emerge from the clouds of increasingly thick smoke, which parallel the fog of grief that Will is steeped in. They show him what he, in his youth and in his grief, cannot see: that he is not capable of committing murder, that he may have the wrong idea about who killed his brother, and that, more than anything, he’s caught in a cycle of violence which could lead him to an early grave, just like his uncle, father, and brother.
The Pain of Toxic Masculinity
Toxic masculinity prevents the masculine-identifying characters in the book from fully expressing their emotions, which leads to pain and violence. Here, toxic masculinity mirrors the socio-cultural idea that “big boys don’t cry” and that prohibits men in particular from showing or even having a vocabulary for their inherent pain and vulnerability beyond anger and reactivity. The Rules require that men do not cry under any circumstances, leaving them with an inability to express their emotions directly. Will describes being unable to cry in violent terms, saying that, preventing himself from crying after his brother dies feels like being punched and kicked from within. In addition, in the wake of Dani’s death when he was 8 years old, Will, freshly learning the rule that prohibits crying, says that it feels like he wanted to rip his skin off or punch something so there would be a hole in something other than Dani. This illustrates that Will experiences his repressed emotions immediately as violence, both violence enacted within his own body and violence that he wants to express on the world.
The energy of emotion needs to be released and grasping for violence is a way to restore balance in the absence of crying or other direct expressions. The tenet of emotional repression is passed down from father to son, from brother to brother, suggesting that this is a form of intergenerational trauma. It is telling that Will’s father can only express his concern for Will’s safety and well-being by drawing a gun and holding it to Will’s head to terrify and humiliate him. Unable to express himself emotionally or to articulate his complex emotions, he teaches Will a lesson through the threat of violence, which is painful and even traumatic for Will.
