49 pages • 1 hour read
Morgan TaltyFire Exit
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 15-21Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 15 Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of illness, mental illness, and death.
Louise seems to know more about Bobby’s past than Charles does, and Charles is struck by how much his friend must have shared with his mother. Charles continues to divide his time between caring for Louise and watching Elizabeth through his front windows. Long accustomed to seeing his daughter looking put together and in work clothes, he worries as he observes her, day after day, wearing the same hoodie and basketball shorts. She has taken up smoking, and he worries about that as well. He recalls his relationship with Mary, including the way she’d show up at his house in the middle of the night. He remembers the day she told him that she was pregnant. She relayed the news, informed him that the baby couldn’t be his, and then put everything of hers that she’d left at his house into a garbage bag and left. Later, he figured out that she wanted her daughter to be Penobscot enough to claim tribal membership and that if she listed Charles as the father on her birth certificate, that wouldn’t be possible. Her decision gutted him, and he still feels the sting of her choice to exclude him not just from Elizabeth’s official ancestry but also from her life.
Chapter 16 Summary
Charles takes Louise to her ECT appointment. In the waiting room, he is shocked to run into Mary. Mary is there with Elizabeth, and Charles is even more worried about his daughter. He is sure that whatever kind of emotional distress she has been experiencing is caused, in some way, by his genetics. He feels sadness, guilt, and grief, but most of all, he wants to tell her the truth: that he is her father.
Gizos is home visiting, and Charles finally tells him the entire story. Gizos is initially shocked, and when Charles asks his opinion on telling Elizabeth that he is her father, Gizos advises him against it. Charles knows that Mary would probably agree with Gizos, but he desperately wants to help and know his daughter.
Chapter 17 Summary
Gizos’s father is dying. Charles goes to see him in the hospital, but only because his friend asked him to. He does not have fond memories of Lenno. After the visit, he and Gizos talk. While on his way home, he wonders if the strange calls came from Gizos. Gizos asks about their teenage rift, and Charles realizes that Gizos still loves him. Charles knows that he cannot love Gizos back in this way because of Gizos’s husband and son, but he hugs his friend and tries to communicate silently how much he still cares about him. Gizos reiterates that Charles should not tell Elizabeth who he is and asks if Elizabeth even knows that Roger is not her biological father. Charles is not sure. He still wants to tell her but wonders if Gizos is right and the news would be too much for Elizabeth to bear, especially at a time when she seems to be in so much pain already.
Chapter 18 Summary
At the hospital where Louise receives her ECT treatments, she and Charles again run into Mary and Elizabeth. Charles learns that Elizabeth goes by “Ellie.” Elizabeth, Mary, and Louise talk, and Louise introduces them to her “baby,” the stuffed elephant. Charles is struck by how complex family relationships are and wonders what his mother remembers of her past. He reflects on Mary and Roger’s family life and on the fact that his daughter grew up with another man as her father. As they are leaving, Louise seems to have forgotten that she has spent so much time caring for the elephant and almost leaves it behind. Cryptically, she tells Charles that she recognizes him and now knows who he is.
Chapter 19 Summary
The next morning, Charles is woken up by Mary as he dreams of Fredrick. She is standing in his kitchen, looking for his coffee. She tells him that Elizabeth has always been “ill,” not physically but spiritually. She relates the story of Elizabeth’s early childhood epilepsy, which Mary first misdiagnosed as melodrama and bad behavior. She explains that Elizabeth always lived with depression and often stays up all night long and then sleeps all day. She explains that Ellie has been in and out of various kinds of treatments throughout her life and that until recently, she and Roger hoped that they’d worked. Charles explains that he’d like to tell Elizabeth that he is her father and argues that her depression might be a sign that her body and her spirit know that something is not quite right. Mary is strongly opposed to this idea and tells Charles as much. The two argue, becoming increasingly heated, and Mary throws a cup of water in Charles’s face as she storms out the door.
Chapter 20 Summary
Louise is too sick one day to go to her ECT appointment, so Charles stays home watching television with her. Bobby calls, and Charles goes to pick him up from the bar. Bobby is intoxicated and threatens to kill Louise’s neighbor, the man he was recently arrested for assaulting. Charles worries that Bobby will make good on his threat and decides to see if this man would be willing to drop the charges.
After Charles gets back home, he hears drumming and singing. At first, he cannot pinpoint the source of the sound, but fearing that it is a death song for Lenno, he jumps into his truck and drives over to the reservation. He is right, and he sings along silently. Although no one gathered to mourn Lenno would recognize Charles as Penobscot, Charles remembers Fredrick teaching him this song and the tribe’s various funeral traditions.
Chapter 21 Summary
Charles heads to his mother’s house the next morning. She does not answer the door, and he has to let himself in with his key. He finds her sorting through an enormous pile of junk mail and sits down to help her. At the bottom of the bag is Louise’s telephone. He asks about its presence in the garbage, and she tells him that it would not stop making noise, so she threw it away. He gently tries to explain that she cannot get rid of her phone, but he can see that she is having a particularly difficult day and that his words don’t quite reach her.
The next day, a large storm is forecasted, and Charles gathers supplies and prepares for a potential power outage. Louise is now physically ill as well as experiencing accelerating memory loss, and Charles worries that she can’t withstand a prolonged period of time without power. The storm lasts for several days, but Louise’s fever eventually breaks, and she seems to be improving. Charles dutifully goes outside to shovel periodically and cooks meals for himself and his mother. When the storm finally ends, Louise falls silent, and Charles is sure that she has no idea who he is. This realization, although not a surprise, plunges him into a state of even more pronounced melancholy.
Chapters 15-21 Analysis
The author returns to the issue of blood quantum in these chapters as Charles recalls the day that Mary told him she was pregnant and left. Blood quantum is a widely practiced manner of determining eligibility for tribal enrollment and is a fiercely contested topic in many Indigenous communities, in part because the practice was originally imposed by the US state and federal governments. Although the author only uses the term “blood quantum” a handful of times, its impact on individuals and families is central to the narrative, and the entire novel is meant, in part, to spark conversation about the practice. Talty’s depiction of blood quantum, because it focuses overwhelmingly on its negative consequences, critiques the practice, instead advocating for an understanding of Indigenous identity that is rooted in experience rather than in conceptions of biological race, which are not only arbitrary but also ultimately rooted in Western colonialism.
For example, Mary’s decision to list an Indigenous man on her daughter’s birth certificate deeply wounded Charles, and he has struggled with that pain throughout the entirety of the novel. Because Mary continued to visit Charles late at night, it is clear that Mary was not ready to end their relationship. This suggests that the need to have a “true” Penobscot daughter has also placed an emotional burden on Mary: She had to give up a life with the man she loved. It is also evident that her choice has harmed Elizabeth. Mary tells Charles that Elizabeth always had a “spiritual sickness,” and Charles (somewhat ironically, given his closeness to his stepfather) is sure that blood ties are so strong that Elizabeth must have sensed that Roger was not her biological father and that she had a loving father who was grief-stricken that he was not allowed to see her.
These chapters also explore The Enduring Strength of Family Ties by further contextualizing Charles’s desire to parent a child in terms of his memories of Fredrick. Both Charles and Louise remain mired in grief over his death, and Charles observes, “Fredrick was a dream now, but he was still very much alive between my mother and me” (186). Fredrick’s enduring legacy is one of love and familial obligation, and Charles continues to honor his surrogate father by caring for his mother. Fredrick taught Charles how to be kind, loving, and committed to his family, and this spirit of service guides Charles through the difficult moments in his end-of-life care for his mother, helping him to remain connected to his family’s core values. While this dynamic reverses the typical pattern of caretaking in the parent-child relationship, it underscores Charles’s capacity to love and care for others selflessly—qualities that would benefit him as a parent.
The way that adult children navigate their parents’ deaths becomes an important subtext at this point in the novel. Charles has coped with Fredrick’s death and is realizing that Louise will soon succumb to her dementia. Bobby, too, struggles as his father declines and dies, although he is less willing than Charles to reflect on his experiences. Gizos returns home after many years of absence to spend time with his father during his final days, and Charles notes how the two remained bonded even though Lenno obviously disapproved of his son’s sexual orientation. Each of these men navigates the death of their parents in a unique way, and moments like this help show the author’s interest in masculinity: He provides multiple examples of contemporary Indigenous masculinities, creating a rubric for Indigenous men as they approach life’s trickier milestones.
The author continues to depict Cultural Heritage, Identity, and Belonging in these chapters. Charles’s respect for Indigenous culture is on display as he confronts Lenno’s death. Lenno played a role in Charles’s ostracization on the reservation, and he has ample cause to resent him. Yet he remembers and sings the traditional Penobscot death song for someone who, despite his violence, politics, and malign intentions toward Charles, is nonetheless Charles’s elder. He does so to honor Fredrick and the Indigenous nation that he feels so connected to even though it does not recognize his membership.
