The Dew Breaker

The image of home in Edwidge Danticat's The Dew Breaker is a primary symbol of the struggle between memories of home and life in the United States for Haitians. In the novel, we come to know of the "dew breaker," a former murderer and member of the Tontons Macoute, the enforcers for the murderous Fancois Duvalier regime. We come to know of the "dew breaker" through stories that are loosely connected, told by victims or family members of victims of the man who now leads a reformed life, loved by his wife Anne and daughter Ka, who he views as his "angels." While many Haitians are torn between their love for their homeland and their inability to return home, the "dew breaker" remains a prisoner in his own home, causing his daughter to ask why no one ever comes to visit them. In this manner, the images of home in the novel relate to the individual dilemma of a reformed murderer trying to find inner peace and a generation of dispossessed Haitians who can, truly, never go home again.

The opening story in Danticat's The Dew Breaker is narrated by the title character's loving and loved daughter, Ka. She is named Ka because of its reference in Egyptian to the word soul. In Haitian, her father tells Ka, it means "good angel," (Danticat, p. 8). The narrator is shocked to discover, on their way to deliver a sculpture of her father she carved, that her father was never a prisoner in a Haitian jail as she thought. Instead, he was a brutal murdere

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