37 pages • 1 hour read
Peter HellerThe Dog Stars
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Displacement
Throughout The Dog Stars, displacement is a major theme. The novel’s narrative present is nine years after a combination of a superflu and blood disease have wiped out most of humanity, effectively displacing those who live through the pandemic from the life and society they once knew. In regard to his plight and present mind-state, after the collapse, Hig offers this analogy:
Thoughts that once belonged, that felt at home with each other, were now discomfited, unsure, depressed, like those shaggy Norwegian ponies that Russian professor moved to the Siberian Arctic I read about before. He was trying to recreate the Ice Age, a lot of grass and fauna and few people […] Half the ponies died, I think of heartbreak for their Scandinavian forests, half hung out at the research station and were fed grain and still died. That’s how my thoughts are sometimes. When I’m stressed (8).
When Hig encounters Pops and Cima, his sense of displacement is eased: “For the first time in what seemed like years my head seemed clear” (176). However, Hig’s sense of feeling displaced by societal collapse can’t help but remain. Hig perceives this feeling in others as well, such as when Hig, Cima, and Pops fly towards Grand Junction, now in ruins, and Cima vomits: “I understood the shock of seeing Grand Junction. It was one thing to lose the whole world as you knew it, another to see, to maybe smell your old neighborhood as charnel house and killing field” (273). Post-collapse society has turned all these characters have known on its head, and time and again, we see Hig forlorn and wandering from his sense of being displaced. On occasion, this truth gets Hig in trouble, distracted as he is by his thoughts of the past. By contrast, Bangley, while also feeling literally displaced due to collapse, also thrives in his new environment, with day-to-day survival affording him an agency he didn’t possess in his past existence. The scope and depth of one’s displacement, Heller seems to suggest, is tied to how fulfilling one’s former life was.
The Beauty of Nature
Hig often waxes poetic about flying, fishing, or hiking to the creek, and the simple of beauty of nature dominates The Dog Stars. Heller dedicates a fair amount of page space to description of the environment, as though by naming plants, trees, and animals, Hig can reclaim portions of his past life and past identity. Here, Hig discusses fishing:
All of this, these motions, the sequence, the quiet, the rill and gulp, the riffle of the stream and the wind soughing the needles of the tall trees. As I strung the rod. I had known it all hundreds, probably now thousands of times. It was ritual that required no thought. Like putting on socks. Except this ritual put me in touch with something that felt very pure. Meaning that in fishing I had always all my life brought the best of myself (55).
Flying above the perimeter, before heading towards Grand Junction, Hig observes the pristine expanse of nature:
Whoosh off a band of cliff. And the valley opens: a green river backed by a high double mountain with a swooping saddle between. Orchards, the neat rows of tufted trees on either side of the river. Vineyards too. Tall cottonwoods marking the westward twisting course of the stream. In the west where the river flows out of the valley […] I can see the railroad tracks, the flat topped mesas and the massing uplift of the Plateau, purple in the morning haze (157).
Heller’s language, here, is form meeting function: the lyrical quality of the prose highlights the nostalgia inherent to Hig’s character and further highlights the theme of displacement, as nature often appears the most idyllic to Hig when he was removed from and above it, in his plane. Further, at a metafictional level, Heller effectively eschews plot in these lengthy, lyrical passages, setting it aside and concentrating on language for language’s sake.
As the novel progresses, this descriptive language continues. Often, Hig’s observations create the sense that despite the devastation of the flu and blood disease, the hugeness and pristine beauty of the larger world are no match for the ills of humanity.
Ghosts and Dreams
Many times throughout the novel, Heller employs both ghost and dream imagery to communicate characters’ respective states of mind. This is especially true for both Hig and Cima. Hig’s dreams shift from haunting, and regret over losing Melissa and his former life, to more uplifting, after Hig and Cima’s relationship grows more intimate.
Often, Hig’s waking life also possesses a dreamlike quality, as evidenced when he lands the Beast after spotting Pops and Cima from the air:
The flight over already seemed like another life. And the airport seemed like a dream. If the airport was a dream, then Jasper was a dream behind a dream, and before was a dream behind that. Within and within. Dreaming. How we gentle our losses into paler ghosts (183-84).
Hig’s feeling that he’s living in a dream within a dream communicates a sense of lost reality. Hig is both haunted and relieved by the past. Thinking that everything might be a dream allows Hig to create distance between himself and the horrible reality of human devastation and societal collapse.
We also see Cima’s dream about her husband haunther:
Last night she said. After we fell asleep. I dreamt of Tomas. Dreamt and dreamt of him […] He was dying on his cot and calling me, bleating just like an animal that knows it’s going to slaughter […] And I stood against the wall unwilling to help him. My husband. My best friend (26).
Heller creates interesting narrative contrast by giving Cima and Hig different dream worlds. If Cima is haunted in the present, this seems to present Hig with the possibility to move past his own nightmares, and revitalize. Before, Hig dreams of someone robbing his home, indicating his guilt over Melissa’s death and suggesting Hig feels he could have done more:
The dreams of the old house stopped. Now I dreamt of big cats, tigers and mountain lions flowing down through the rocks to the river at twilight, the unblinking eyes seeing everything. In the dream there was a sense of supreme grace and power and also intelligence. In these dreams I came face to face with the beasts very close and looked into their eyes and something was transmitted but nothing I could ever name (242).
Broadly, the subconscious allows the mind a way to process events that the conscious mind cannot. In a world where Hig must necessarily devote much of his waking time to thoughts of survival, the subconscious mind becomes an even more important tool for actualizing the trauma Hig has incurred.
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By Peter Heller
