The image of home in Edwidge DanticatÆs 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 ôdew breaker,ö a former murderer and member of the Tontons Macoute, the enforcers for the murderous Fancois Duvalier regime. We come to know of the ôdew breakerö 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 ôangels.ö While many Haitians are torn between their love for their homeland and their inability to return home, the ôdew breakerö 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 DanticatÆs The Dew Breaker is narrated by the title characterÆs 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 ôgood angel,ö (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 murderer working for the Duvalier death machine. As he tells his daughter, ôYou see, Ka, your father was the hunter, he was not the prey,ö (Danticat, p. 9).
Despite trying to distance himself from his past, the Dew Breaker is trapped by his memories of killing that haunt him like ghosts in the present. His final act of torturing and killing a dissident priest is the final story in the book, one that shows the Dew Breaker may have become reluctant to carr
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