The sculptor wakes up in a motel room on the morning of the delivery, and discovers her father, also a Haitian refugee, has disappeared with her sculpture.
The man tells Dany not to mention to his wife any of their nights out or the women the narrator has brought back home.
The story's underlying tone of sadness reflects in the fact that Nadine is hiding from everyone that she went through with an abortion after being impregnated by a man named Eric.
This abortion plays a large role throughout the story, tying back to one's voice because Nadine has never shared with even her own family that she was pregnant.
Her parents who still reside in Haiti write to her once a month and constantly try reaching out to talk to their daughter as well as thank her for the money she sends to help with her father's medical expenses.
Nadine takes special interest in a patient named Ms. Hinds, a young women who had suffered from cancer and was left unable to speak.
One day, the two have an interesting interaction after Ms. Hinds is held down by multiple nurses due to her thrashing about in an upset manor.
Narrated by Ka's mother Anne, The Book of Miracles chronicles the family's car trip through NYC to get to Christmas-Eve mass.
Constant is known for his involvement, and leadership, in a paramilitary group called the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti (FRAPH).
The potential presence of Constant coupled with the religious setting brings to light Anne's own guilt and fear of living a lie, both with her relationship with her daughter and as a member of the Haitian community in NYC.
[6] These suburbs were places that Haitian members of society could go to feel safe and protest the regimes of the Tonton Macoutes and the FRAPH.
Dany has traveled so far because he's found the murderer of his parents, only to find that Claude, a young man and patricide, has been accepted into the community he stills feels to be so much a part of him.
In Danticat’s The Dew Breaker, the story titled “The Bridal Seamstress” portrays a Journalism intern named Aline Cajuste, and her interview with Beatrice Saint Fort.
This interview highlight's Beatrice's retirement from being a bridal seamstress in the United States, after venturing from her home in Haiti.
The peaceful moments she has on the porch, and the ash leaves falling, could display an act of defiance she commits sitting outside on the block.
In this Chapter, Michel reveals his childhood life as he ponders over the time during Baby Doc's (Jean-Claude Duvalier) presidency.
We also learn about the minor labor Michel provided as a child to, Monsieur Christophe, the neighborhood water- and bread-shop owner who had power, authority, and control.
While in the present moment, Michel's wife is pregnant with what he believes is a son, he continues to look back into his past and share what ultimately disconnected those close to him in his neighborhood.
Upon the rise of this knowledge, U.S. President Ronald Reagan and his administration claimed that the Haitian government had failed, and that Baby Doc had to move to France.
The final chapter begins by telling the story of a famous Baptist preacher who is captured by the Tonton Macoutes and meets a brutal end in the Casernes Dessalines.
Ka's father shoots him several times in the chest, killing him, and in confusion and nausea, leaves the barracks to find himself in the street.
She has no idea that the man she runs into is responsible for her brother's death, and decides to take him home and help heal his bleeding face.
[8] The reoccurring, cyclical events, the parallels between characters, and the symbolic imagery in each of the short stories is emblematic of Danticat's tale of Marasa.
Danticat uses the binary of physical and emotional trauma in power imbalances to expose key thematic issues in the Haitian struggles resulting from the Duvalier totalitarian dictatorship.
By symbolically drowning the statue, Bienaimé's actions surface questions of remembrance, forgiveness, and remorse in “The Book of the Dead.
"[10] By placing the reader in a story of Marasa, Danticat calls attention to the act of the writer as a “witness” to political, structural, and personal struggles, exposing other thematic issues as a consequence.
For example, in "The Book of The Dead" we hear a story of a young woman who admires her father but was unaware of what he did in his time in prison.
Yet even with all of these negatives coming from the past, the characters, the people of this story never seem to let it truly affect their futures they built for themselves and their families.
The Dew Breaker is one of Danticat's older works, but the lesson in both moving forward and remembering the past hold true throughout its pages.
“She delivers her most beautiful and arresting prose when describing the most brutal atrocities and their emotional aftermath,” says the Washington Post.