Question 1

Why does Salvage the Bones use Greek mythology?

Accepted Answer

Esch, the novel's narrator, is obsessed with the Greek myths she has been reading in a book she found, and she uses them to make sense of her own life: she identifies with Medea, the woman who killed her children out of rage at Jason's betrayal; she sees Manny, the boy she loves hopelessly, as Jason. The Greek mythology serves several purposes in the novel. It gives Esch a framework for understanding extreme emotion and extreme action — the kind of emotion and action that her family's situation and the approaching storm require; it gives Ward a literary context that universalizes the story of a poor Black family in Mississippi without diminishing its specificity; and it connects the Batiste family's experience of poverty, family, and natural catastrophe to the oldest Western stories about those subjects. The comparison of Katrina to a divine force, and of the family's survival to the labor of ancient heroes, is not ironic: Ward takes the Batiste family's struggle as seriously as Homer took Achilles's, and the mythological frame enforces that seriousness.

Question 2

How does Salvage the Bones portray Hurricane Katrina?

Accepted Answer

Salvage the Bones approaches Katrina obliquely — through the twelve days leading up to the storm rather than through the storm itself — and this approach is central to the novel's political argument. By showing the Batiste family's preparation for Katrina, Ward shows what poverty means in the face of a natural disaster: the family cannot evacuate because they have no money and nowhere to go; they have no insurance, no savings, no options other than to board up the house and wait. The novel's portrait of what the family has — a fighting pit bull, a car on blocks, a house full of objects salvaged from other people's discards, a community of neighbors in similar circumstances — is simultaneously an inventory of poverty and an inventory of what poor Black families in the Mississippi Delta have built from nothing. Katrina in the novel is not only a natural disaster but an exposure of the existing disaster: the systematic disinvestment in poor Black communities that made Katrina so much more lethal in some neighborhoods than in others.

Question 3

What is the significance of Esch's pregnancy in Salvage the Bones?

Accepted Answer

Esch's pregnancy — she is fifteen and pregnant by Manny, who does not acknowledge their relationship — runs through the entire novel as both a literal situation and a thematic counterpoint to the approaching storm. The novel's final sections bring the two together: the storm that strips everything away and the pregnancy that adds something new. Esch's pregnancy is also the novel's primary vehicle for the Greek mythology: her identification with Medea is partly about a woman's power to create and destroy, and the novel's ending — which refuses the comfortable resolution of Esch deciding what to do — leaves the pregnancy as an open possibility rather than a determined outcome. Ward has said that she wanted to write about a teenage pregnancy that was neither a moral lesson nor a simple plot problem, but simply a fact of life for a poor young woman who is already managing more than most adults ever have to manage.

Salvage the Bones Reading Order

Complete Salvage the Bones Book List