54 pages • 1-hour read
The Antidote
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Themes
The Weight of Memory
Content Warning: This section of the guide contains references to racism and death.
The Antidote’s ability to “store” the memories that her clients wish to forget makes her services popular. Because she is a “Vault,” people of all ages come to her in order to unburden themselves of painful or uncomfortable memories. Each person speaks of a lightness and an inexplicable sense of relief and happiness when their “deposit” is made to the Antidote. By relieving them of the painful weight of these memories, the Antidote makes a meaningful and valuable contribution to her society, even though her magical gifts alienate her from the community, leading others to view her with suspicion if not outright hostility.
As the novel unfolds, the dangers of losing or relinquishing memories become apparent. Cleo Allfrey, for instance, plays an important role as an outsider. This places her in a position to regard the community objectively, and she concludes that there is an emptiness and a vacancy about the citizens. Her assessment suggests that the positive results that follow immediately from a deposit do not outweigh the long-term damages. Her point of view paints the people of Uz as hollow and unfeeling (not unlike the scarecrow that is an important symbol for the novel) indicating that to be a complete person is to carry both positive and negative memories with you. Without their memories, the people of Uz are incomplete. Ultimately the novel demonstrates that it is their memories, no matter how painful, that play an integral role in identity and wholeness.
This theme extends beyond the individual to the communal. By withdrawing his father’s deposit, Harp Oletsky receives the burden of the wrongdoings his father has committed. His father attempted to escape these mistakes, but his escape harmed the larger, cultural record of the community. Without acknowledging the violence that settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing have done to the Pawnee community, the town of Uz cannot live an authentic life, and the barren, exhausted quality of the soil becomes a metaphor for the moral and spiritual exhaustion of the town. Accepting responsibility for these past wrongs—recovering and acknowledging even the most painful memories—is an important step, the novel asserts, in healing.
Justice as Righting Past Wrongs
The novel explores the tensions between competing visions of justice. This exploration begins with the murders done by the supposed Lucky Rabbit’s Foot Killer. In keeping with legal tradition, the town expects the killer to be punished with death, believing that this death is the only acceptable form of justice for the murdered women. However, the novel continually underscores how difficult true justice can be to attain—Dell, whose mother is thought to be a victim of the murderer, is not eager to see Dew punished: Punishing Dew by taking away his life does not right the imbalance caused by the death of her mother. Further, when the Antidote learns that Sheriff Iscoe has framed Dew and thus has carried out an injustice, she is burdened by the weight of this truth. Knowing that the sheriff is responsible weighs heavily on Antonina—as well as on Cleo, Dell, and Harp, once Cleo’s photos provide proof of the sheriff’s concealment of his crimes. Though they know that exposing this truth is dangerous—indeed, the sheriff does retaliate by attempting to shoot Cleo with his gun—they are committed to bringing the sheriff’s deeds to light in hopes that Dew will be set free. For Sheriff Iscoe, justice is a self-protective performance designed to maintain social order. His goal is not to right wrongs but to pacify the community and maintain his own authority. For Dell, the Antidote, and eventually Harp Oletsky, justice has a very different meaning: These characters argue that justice has not been done until hidden wrongs are exposed and put right.
Righting past wrongs is what Harp sets out to do when, burdened with the weight of his father’s secret, he informs the citizens of Uz of the wrongs committed by their ancestors against the Pawnees. Harp comes to regard the damage of the Dust Bowl as a kind of punishment for the way that the land was stolen from its owners, the Pawnee. Harp feels culpable for this theft and the ensuing destruction, given that his father played an active role in harming the Pawnee and he himself continues to profit from the stolen land. Just as the Antidote and Cleo place their lives and their safety at risk by exposing the sheriff’s wrongdoing, so does Harp risk his own safety by calling on the town to right this past wrong. When Harp, Dell, Cleo, and Antonina survive the attacking mob, the sheriff’s gunfire, and the tornado, the implication is that their moral actions—standing up for justice—earned them their lives.
The Interconnectedness of Humans and Nature
The novel’s plot takes place between two significant (and historically factual) natural occurrences: a dust storm and a flood. These natural phenomena are fraught with symbolic meaning. For the duration of the novel, the people of Uz suffer as a result of mishandling of their farmland. Failure to rotate crops has led to the loss of topsoil, and this loss of topsoil leads to the dust that plagues the lives of the people of Uz. A period of prolonged drought—a phenomenon that had always been part of life in the American West but that relatively recent white settlers knew little about—greatly exacerbates the problem, leading to crop failures and massive clouds of dust that, in the most severe cases, ranged all the way to the US East Coast. Human actions, then, have a large-scale impact on the physical world, which, in turn, impacts the well-being of those humans when their crops fail and their livelihood suffers.
In the novel, Harp Oletsky comes to understand how the theft of the land from its original owners—in his home region, the Pawnee people—leads to the land’s mismanagement. He suggests that these Indigenous people had learned ways to tend the land by giving the land what it needs, rather than being greedy for quick profit. He comes to regard the suffering of the people of Uz by the dust and drought as a kind of repercussion for the wrongs they have committed against the Pawnees in the past. The photographs produced by Cleo’s camera capture the happiness that radiated out from the land when the Pawnees tended to it and foretells of a dark future if the mishandling of the land is to continue.
The rainstorm that ensues coincides with Harp’s speech, which urges the town to right its past wrongs by somehow returning the land to the Pawnees. Harp is spurred on to make this plea upon learning of the atrocities committed against the land’s native people and of his own ancestors’ culpability in these acts. That the rain falls—and in abundance—symbolically indicates that Harp is being rewarded by taking the moral action. Yet ultimately Harp and the others are reminded of nature’s power over humans when the flood and subsequent tornado destroy his healthy wheat crop entirely. In this way, humans are at the mercy of nature’s will even when their own actions distort the course of nature.
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