37 pages • 1 hour read
Sharon M. DraperDarkness Before Dawn
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2001A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Hazelwood High School
The one constant in the lives of the characters in Darkness Before Dawn is Hazelwood High School. The institution symbolizes the theme of survival through support. The tragedies and triumphs that the characters face all originate here. Both Rob and Andy were basketball players on the school team before their tragic deaths. Angel and Joyelle are freshmen at the school when each one experiences her own trauma. Angel collapses from anorexia nervosa, and Joyelle crashes a car. Rita is attacked by Jonathan while running on the track team at the school. Keisha would never have met Jonathan at all if his father hadn’t been the principal who offered his son a teaching job there.
The school’s annual calendar of activities provides the backdrop for many of the subsequent events in the novel. A basketball game initiated the story arc related to the deaths of Rob and Andy. The sports program connects Jonathan to Rita. Keisha first becomes attracted to Jonathan in the guise of a wise teacher who helps her understand the arts better. Jonathan plans his seduction of Keisha to coincide with the school’s Valentine Dance.
Just as most trauma in the students’ lives centers around Hazelwood High, so does the support group that will help each one deal with their challenges and rise above them. Angel and Joyelle both find support from their families and fellow students. Angel’s brother makes sure she eats enough to overcome her disorder. Keisha and her friends help by bringing delicious food to Angel’s house. After Joyelle crashes her father’s car, all her friends from school rush to the hospital to help her through the crisis.
When Keisha can’t face herself after Jonathan’s attack, former student Rita is the one who helps turn the situation around. Later, Keisha’s classmates support her recovery by asking her to give a speech at graduation. Her final words to the class show how aware she is of the school’s role in shaping all of them and teaching them to support each other: “And all of us, the senior class, clutched our diplomas, left the shadows of the past behind us, and marched proudly out of the auditorium into the dawn of our tomorrows” (273).
Silver Knife
Jonathan carries a silver knife in his pocket. Although the reader isn’t aware of this item until late in the novel, in retrospect, it becomes an important symbol of Jonathan’s emotional disturbance and the conspiracies of silence that cloak his activities.
When Keisha first appears on the graduation stage at the story’s beginning, she fingers her butterfly necklace and a small scar on her neck. The reader doesn’t learn until much later that Jonathan’s knife caused the scar during his attempted rape on Valentine’s Day.
When Rita is first seen, she emerges from the woods with apparent scratches and cuts caused by falling into the shrubbery. Later, she tells Keisha that Jonathan cut her with his knife and threatened to kill her with it if she ever told anyone that he assaulted her. Before that, he succeeded in raping her by threatening her with the same weapon.
When Keisha is attacked in Jonathan’s apartment, she manages to get the knife away from him and slash his face. The subsequent scar seems to warn away other prospective victims for a time. Jonathan uses his knife one more time in his attack on a girl in Kentucky. This attempted rape finally lands him in prison.
It isn’t until the story is nearly over that the reader learns the full meaning of the knife. Mr. Hathaway tells Keisha’s family that the knife was the only gift Jonathan’s mother ever gave him. Since he had earlier confessed to Keisha that he could never win his mother’s love, the knife becomes the symbolic means by which Jonathan extorts love from women. A conspiracy of silence has clouded the meaning of the object throughout the novel. The most deafening silence of all is the inability of Jonathan’s mother to ever say the words, “I love you.”
Butterfly
The butterfly is a recurring motif in the novel that relates to the theme of becoming an adult. It appears at various points as both a physical object and a metaphor. Leon makes an explicit connection between a butterfly and Keisha. In his mind, she will always seem like a butterfly. He says, “I’ve always watched you, Keisha. You were always pretty and popular—like a butterfly—fluttering and shining for others to admire. People like to hang around you” (125).
On Christmas, Keisha receives a butterfly pendant from an anonymous admirer. At the time, she assumes the gift is from Jonathan but later learns Leon sent it. She adopts it as her personal totem and wears the necklace constantly. In both the opening and closing scenes of the book, she touches the necklace, indicating her connection to the butterfly’s symbolism.
Jonathan also notices the necklace, but he draws a different comparison between Keisha and the butterfly. He tells her, “Remember, you’re not like the rest of the girls. They’re still crawling around like caterpillars. You are already a butterfly—ready to try her wings” (155). Of course, Jonathan is alluding to sexual experience, hoping Keisha will view having sex as proof that she’s superior to her wormlike classmates.
Ultimately, the novel uses the image of the butterfly to indicate the growth in Keisha and all her classmates. By the end of the story, they have all left the safety of their childhood cocoons to emerge into the adult world as butterflies. Keisha’s speech to the graduating class alludes to this transformation when she tells them, “Let us take our spirits now, like the flames of many candles, to a new world, a world of hope and possibilities, a place where butterflies are magic and dreams can never die” (270).
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By Sharon M. Draper
