54 pages • 1-hour read
The Antidote
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Symbols & Motifs
Dust
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of animal cruelty and/or death.
The novel’s Dust Bowl locale is both physical setting and metaphor. The dust poses a significant disturbance to daily life in Uz, making it physically difficult to physically be outside: the dust permeates the air and the landscape, making it hard to see and to breathe. In this way, it poses health a risk that indeed harms some of citizens greatly. It is notable, too, that it is first the effect then the cause of poor farming practices throughout the prairie: The loss of valuable topsoil through farming missteps creates the dust, and as the dust spreads (further exacerbated by a drought) it poses challenges to the growing of future crops. In this way, it creates a vicious cycle that many residents of Uz see no solution for: They feel compelled to flee from Uz in search of a new home where they may escape the dust permanently. The dust, then, acts as a literal punishment for the way the people have abandoned the techniques of the Pawnee, which nurtured the land rather than harmed it.
However, the dust takes on further significance as the novel points to the way that not only is the physical sight of the townspeople clouded, but so is their insight, knowledge, and judgment. In a historical sense, the past and the impact of the wrongdoings of their ancestors has become hidden to them, covered up much in the same way that the dust clouds the landscape. Justifying the stealing of the land from the Pawnees clouds the truth from the present-day citizens of Uz, preventing them from being able to fully see and understand the impact of their collective actions. Only when Harp Oletsky and his household set about “clearing the dust” by revealing the past harms of the town can its members can begin to take steps toward healing. That this coincides with the end of the literal drought via rain points to an optimistic future for the people of Uz.
Harp’s First Memory
When Harp is a child, his father forces him to deposit his memory of killing rabbits with a Vault. As he ages, Harp has a memory of visiting a Vault to make the deposit, but he has no knowledge of the memory itself. He knows his father tore up the deposit slip to make its retrieval impossible. The absence of this memory creates an uncomfortable gap in Harp’s life. The harm he caused the innocent and defenseless rabbits instantly fills him with guilt.
In retrospect, the incident with the rabbits parallels other moments of violence in the novel. Harp’s father, Tomasz, justifies the harm to the rabbits because he regards them as unjustly encroaching on the land and crops that belong to the people of Uz. In his view, the rabbits are invaders, and death is a just punishment for their stealing the crops that the people depend on. This justification is the same logic applied by early Uz settlers to drive the Pawnee from their land onto reservations and to steal their resources from them. By having the rabbit memory stolen from him, Harp has had the truth of his father’s wrongdoing hidden from him. The return of this memory—coupled with the knowledge of his father’s complicity in atrocities against the Pawnee—provides Harp with the truth of the past. Armed with this truth, he can take steps to right such past wrongs.
The Cat
The mother cat owned by the Iscoe family plays an important role in the novel’s conclusion. Absent from Uz for much of the novel, it reappears during the Founder’s Day celebration, suggesting that it is an important part of the community. When violence breaks out against Harp Oletsky and Cleo Allfrey, the cat acts to protect them in a manner that suggests a kind of magical or divine intervention on the part of the cat. This protection continues when the cat follows the group of protagonists back to the Oletsky farm and attempts to harm Sheriff Iscoe when he threatens to shoot the group with his gun. In this way, the cat acts as an agent of justice, protecting the group in its efforts to carry out justice by bringing the sheriff’s wrongdoings to light.
When the novel shifts to the cat’s narrative perspective, readers learn of her inability to forget the children she has had who have died. Her actions suggest that the sheriff is responsible for these deaths and, in this way, the death of her kittens is reminiscent of the way the sheriff has covered up the death of Mink Petrusev. It is also reminiscent of the children forced into adoption by the Milford Home, including Antonina’s son. The cat chooses to birth her new litter of kittens in the Oletsky root cellar for deliberate reasons—as she intends to serve as a model of strength for the women who witness her giving birth. That her new children survive despite the tornado that rages is a testament to this strength and to her determination.
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