Sunrise
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Part 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of emotional and physical abuse, mental illness, death, graphic violence, and animal death.
Part 5: “An Incident on the Road to Hemot City: September 2024”
Part 5, Chapter 9 Summary: “Day 6”
Using the map from the binder she found, Nina confirms she is in the abandoned town of Sunrise and that Hemot City is 25 miles north. Facing dwindling food supplies and the onset of autumn, she resolves to walk there. Her decision is spurred by memories of her dysfunctional relationship with her boyfriend, Ben, including a recent dinner where he behaved inappropriately toward her employers, Violet Devander and her husband Dr. Michael Devander, and a subsequent fight where he forced Nina out of their van on the highway, leaving her to walk three miles alone at night before returning for her an hour later.
Later, Nina suffers a vivid hallucination of Ben arriving in Sunrise and searching the buildings, causing her to hide in terror. The experience makes her fear she is experiencing a psychological crisis. Nina also alludes to having done something decisive on the plane in its final seconds; she had spoken to Ben in a way reminiscent of her mother. She fears that doing so made things worse.
Feeling a moral obligation to LT Hawley, who kept her alive and gave her the answer to where she was, Nina decides she cannot leave the woman’s remains behind. She goes to the crawl space beneath a stable, retrieves the upper portion of LT Hawley’s skull, cleans it, and packs it for the journey.
Part 5, Chapter 10 Summary: “Day 7”
Nina begins her journey to Hemot City at dawn, carrying LT Hawley’s skull in her backpack. After hours of difficult walking, she accepts she will not reach her destination by nightfall and prepares to make camp. She then spots an orange glow beneath the clouds and, after debating whether it might be a wildfire, abandons her plan and heads toward it, hoping it is a campfire and a more immediate chance of rescue.
As she travels in the dark, she falls into a hole, injuring her leg and losing a shoe. When she finally reaches the source of the smoke, she is devastated to find a lone tree struck by lightning, now dying out in the rain. Defeated and demoralized, she takes shelter in a nearby abandoned shack. She reflects on her mother’s warning that Ben might one day kill her, and realizes her mother will never know that Nina had actually managed to leave Ben in a moment of clarity in those final seconds above Horsebone Lake.
Part 5, Chapter 11 Summary: “Day 8”
The next morning, while trying to retrace her steps, a starving Nina witnesses a wolf pack kill an elk. She runs into the midst of the wolves and ravens, waving her arms and screaming to drive them off the carcass, then takes meat from it. Shortly after, a man with a severely scarred face, Colin Yard, finds her covered in blood and offers her a ride to the hospital in his truck.
On the road, they encounter Ben, who also survived the crash. Against Nina’s protests, Colin stops for him. Ben tells Colin they were engaged before the crash and that Nina jumped from the plane; he attributes the crash to a bird strike. When they pass a single isolated cabin that Colin identifies as Hemot, Nina notices bundled wildflowers and thistles on the seat resembling those she saw in Sunrise, and slowly connects Colin’s name to the final pages of LT Hawley’s manuscript. She accuses him of being connected to LT Hawley’s death. Colin denies this and warns that the elk blood on her may carry a fatal disease, then gestures to his own scarred reflection. Nina suddenly loses consciousness while retaining faint inner awareness. Colin and Ben stop to check on her on the side of the road, but find it difficult to detect her pulse. They believe she is either dead or close to it.
While Colin and Ben are distracted, Nina revives herself, having only faked her loss of consciousness. She steals Colin’s truck and speeds away, leaving the men stranded on the road as she heads for a main highway. LT Hawley’s skull bounces on the seat beside Nina as she hurtles into an unknown future, free from her past.
Part 5 Analysis
Nina’s decision to carry LT Hawley’s skull on her journey to Hemot City establishes a personal and deep engagement with the ethics of memory and place. This act transforms the skull from a macabre object into a talisman of guidance and a physical embodiment of a forgotten history. Her action serves as an intimate form of repatriation, an attempt to restore dignity and narrative to an individual erased by time. The skull is thus a memento mori, a constant reminder of death that paradoxically fuels Nina’s will to live. By taking the remains with her, Nina assumes the role of custodian for a story that would otherwise be lost, a contrast to the acquisitive or exploitative collection of artifacts depicted in Hawley’s manuscript. Her final escape with the skull bouncing on the passenger seat is therefore a commitment to carrying this fragment of the region’s buried past back into the known world.
The narrative uses Nina’s physical deprivation to explore the fragile boundary between psychological trauma and empirical reality. Her vivid hallucination of Ben searching the abandoned buildings of Sunrise is so visceral that she hides in terror, leading her to fear that she could be “going crazy, and not even realize it” (286). This episode externalizes the internal terror she carries from their abusive relationship, demonstrating how her psychological wounds are as immediate a threat as starvation or exposure. The narrative structure reinforces this connection by weaving her memories of Ben’s cruelty into her present struggle for survival. These flashbacks are active psychological forces shaping her decisions. This sustained blurring of internal and external threats makes the eventual, real appearance of Ben all the more disorienting. However, Nina’s journey from being terrorized by a phantom Ben to methodically faking her own death to escape the real one shows her reclaiming control over perception, turning a state of psychological vulnerability into a tool for liberation.
Witnessing a wolf pack kill an elk marks Nina’s final, transformative break from her former self, pushing her beyond calculated survival into a state of primal action. Starving and desperate, she runs directly into the feeding predators and ravens, screaming and waving her arms to claim a piece of the carcass. This confrontation with the brutal, unsentimental reality of the food chain forces her to shed the last vestiges of her urbanized identity. The narrative portrays this as a moment of ecstatic clarity and empowerment, where she finally stops anxiously counting her heartbeats and instead feels them “clamor out of her so recklessly” (307). This act embodies the theme of Nature’s Indifference to Human Ego, as Nina must abandon her human-centric fears and participate directly in the world of predator and prey to live. This baptism in blood is the catalyst for her ultimate escape; having faced down wolves, she is no longer intimidated by the men who seek to control her. Her subsequent theft of the truck becomes the logical culmination of the reclamation of her own life.
Colin Yard’s rescue of Nina deconstructs the heroic tropes common to Westerns, subverting the promise of salvation into a more complex and menacing encounter. Ben immediately seizes control of the narrative, presenting himself to Colin as Nina’s fiancé and fabricating a story of the crash that erases his own culpability. This act is a modern-day example of The Mythologization of the American West, where a sanitized, self-serving account is constructed to obscure a more violent truth. Colin, the scarred and enigmatic stranger, is no simple savior either; his connection to Hemot and LT Hawley, which Nina pieces together from the bundled wildflowers on his seat, casts him as a figure with a hidden, potentially dangerous past. Instead of finding safety, Nina is trapped between her abuser’s manipulative fiction and her rescuer’s ominous ambiguity. Her final, desperate act of stealing the truck is a violent rejection of the roles both men attempt to assign her (damsel in distress, traumatized fiancée) and a seizure of her own story. She physically drives away from their competing myths, taking the physical proof of a real, suppressed history with her in the form of LT Hawley’s skull.
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