What the Wind Knows

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Chapter 10

Chapters 11-19

Chapters 20-26

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Book Club Questions

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Themes

Preserving Culture Through Storytelling

Annie Gallagher is a storyteller raised by a storyteller. Her passion for language comes from her grandfather Eoin, who raises her on poems and songs from his home country of Ireland. This storytelling helps Eoin stay connected to his native country and passes his culture onto Annie. Storytelling here is an exchange that brings people closer together, crossing generational divides. The novel complicates this seemingly linear transaction, however, when, in 1921, Annie recites the same poems and songs for child Eoin. This makes storytelling the foundation of Eoin and Annie’s love for one another, but the novel’s muted science fiction element of time travel also means that the storytelling is a closed loop—Annie learns the stories from Eoin, who learned them from Annie; rather than a way of passing history forward, the novel stumbles into a time loop paradox.

Stories also preserve newly built relationships. When Annie needs to tell Thomas that she came from the future through Lough Gill without losing his trust in her, she builds a bridge between reality and the impossible by connecting her experiences with folklore about Niamh and Oisín, who kept their love for each other though Niamh had an outlandish story about the origins. Annie’s knowledge of this tale and her ability to recite it in Irish Gaelic stresses to Thomas that she is committed to the Irish cause and allows him to believe her. The story binds Thomas and Annie together.

History is also a preserved story—a stringing together of events to explain our origins, generational traumas, and belief systems. Thomas’s journals and letters are historical documents that reach out to Annie across time periods when he is not present. Annie’s love of history is particularly poignant given the absence of her parents, though because she sees Ireland’s history at a remove, she tends to romanticize it rather than understanding its darker moments. To truly preserve Irish culture, Annie must travel back in time to see what the civil war, its antecedents, and aftermath were like for the people who lived it—these visceral memories will turn history into the kind of narrative that passes cultural memory on to future generations.

History as Cultural Narrative

History influences future generations’ understanding of self. This can be positive, fostering pride in one’s culture, or it can be negative, built only on victories that demonized the other. The flip side is the absence of history, the erasure of marginalized or otherwise destroyed civilizations. The narratives a culture tells about itself can excuse the maltreatment of those seen as enemies, but it can also unify people to create meaningful change—it depends on who is telling the story and the biases they introduce into the narrative they craft.

Harmon explores who gets to tell a collective story through the treatment of figures such as Michael Collins. In 2001, Michael Collins is an iconic historical figure lionized in popular culture as a hero who represents admirable qualities such as Irish perseverance, resilience, and hope. This narrative about Michael Collins is so significant to Irish history that it flattens the historical personage into an emblem, dehumanizing him. Part of Harmon’s project is to make Collins’s vulnerabilities and real-life anxieties accessible, thus grounding Collins and allowing readers to have empathy for a man in a dangerous and controversial position of power. By highlighting Collins’s downfall and loss of popularity in 1922, Harmon complicates the simplistic historical narrative.

This theme factors into Annie’s character development as well. At the beginning of the novel, Annie is passionate about history because it soothes her loss of identity. Annie craves knowledge about Ireland to connect with her grandfather and her extended family, whom she has never met. But Annie’s lack of firsthand experience means her understanding of 20th-century Ireland is incomplete and naïve. Annie can enjoy Irish history without reservation because, in 2001, she knows that the revolutionary cause ends in victory. Annie’s time travel helps her to see that the history she romanticizes was actually fraught with violence and fear. While people were fighting for independence, they had no way of knowing whether they would be successful; life was uncertain, unstable, and difficult. Only by traveling back in time can Annie develop the kind understanding that will make her into a less biased, non-propagandistic historian.

Family

In What the Wind Knows, family is the driving force that motivates many of the characters. More generally, Irish history and culture is steeped in the importance of families as clans. Before the British invaded Ireland and made it into a colony, Ireland was a tribal society organized by clans and ruled via large extended families. This connection to family is precisely what Annie craves. Annie’s interest in Ireland stems from stories she hears from her Irish grandfather Eoin, and she only goes to Ireland because it is his last wish. After Eoin dies, Annie transfers her filial love for him to the country of his birth. When Annie travels through time she is given a second chance at having a family—and it is this newfound family that explains Annie’s decision to stay in 1921. Thomas Smith, a symbolic representative of her family and national history, is easy to fall in love with and devote her life to. She simply has nothing equally valuable waiting for her in 2001 New York City.