79 pages • 2 hours read
Hannah TintiThe Good Thief: A Novel
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2008A 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
Ren's Amputated Hand
The mystery surrounding Ren's amputated left hand builds from the novel's first chapter. The major clue about its loss comes in the third chapter, when Father John reads to Ren about Saint Anthony. In the anecdote, Saint Anthony told a young man named Leonardo, who had kicked his mother, to "remove the part of himself that had committed the sin" (20). Leonardo cut off his foot, but Saint Anthony reattached it with a touch of his finger. In a similar fashion, Silas McGinty, Ren's uncle, had cut off Ren's hand when Ren was just an infant. McGinty used a knife to cut off Ren's hand, as he believes that sin resides not only "in the flesh" (20) but is "an indelible part of your soul" (20). McGinty saw Ren as a product of sin between his sister, Margaret, and Ren's father.
Ren's father, Benjamin Nab, not only uses Ren's missing hand to identify his long-lost son, but later, like Saint Anthony, heals Ren in a certain fashion. While many potential adoptive parents overlook Ren because of his hand, Benjamin knows his son will be missing his left hand. Benjamin, a practiced grifter and thief, also exploits Ren's handicap to his benefit by using it to gain and exploit people's sympathy. For example, Benjamin exposes Ren's "cold and lonely nub" (67) to church parishioners knowing they will pity Ren and give him money. Later, though, Benjamin reunites Ren with the thing he wants "most in the world" (313): his hand, which has been preserved in glass by McGinty.
Saint Anthony
As the Catholic patron saint of lost things, Saint Anthony provides a perfect symbol for a novel about theft and loss. The novel begins at an orphanage with "an appropriate name" (271): Saint Anthony's. The orphanage houses lost or misplaced boys like Ren, or Brom and Ichy, whose mother "drowned herself" (22). After reading about Saint Anthony's life and miracles in his stolen copy of The Lives of the Saints, Ren clings to Saint Anthony's mythology. In The Lives of the Saints, Ren reads about how Saint Anthony brought a dead boy "back to life" (24) with a single touch. In a similar way, Benjamin, Tom, and Ren unwittingly bring Dolly, a man who literally lost his life, back from the dead by exhuming his body at the cemetery. When trapped in McGinty's storeroom, Ren, like many Catholics, prays to Saint Anthony to help him find "a knife or a length of rope—anything that would aid him in escaping" (241). At the end of Dolly's life, Ren tells Dolly about how Saint Anthony spent his last years in a walnut tree, "to get as close to heaven as he could" (316). Perhaps by reaching for this image of Saint Anthony's transcendence, Ren hopes for both Dolly's redemption in the afterlife and a new life for himself.
Catholicism
Raised in a Catholic orphanage by monks, Ren carries the lessons, rituals, and ideology of Catholicism with him. Though not a devout Catholic, Ren believes "in his own way" (19). Along with prayer, Father Joseph teaches Ren both corporal and prayer-based penitence for sins. Through these teachings, Ren believes that God weighs each sin differently, so that each sin has a "proper penance" (51). After first joining Benjamin and Tom, both non-religious career criminals, Ren feels upset and confused. When Ren joins Benjamin and Tom in digging up corpses, Ren feels "God's eye upon him, like a pointed stick at the back of his neck" (139). Ren's guilt initially overshadows his ability to join in Benjamin and Tom's escapades. However, without the brothers' and father's guidance and rituals of confession, Ren's relationship to Catholicism decays, to the point that he takes out all the penance he'd "neglected to say for the past eight months" (284) on Dolly, using the murderer as a surrogate priest.
Ren seems to swing back and forth between believing God will forgive anything with proper penance and believing that some sins are "too big to hide" (51). For example, by the novel's second half, Ren has no qualms about breaking into a church, stealing a robe from "the makings of a nativity scene" (160), and teaching Dolly the sign of the cross so he can pose as a monk. Later, Ren tries to bargain with God, making promises to "be nicer to the twins" (257) and "find Benjamin and forgive him" (257), so that God will help him escape McGinty's imprisonment. Ren never fully abandons his adherence to Catholicism. After witnessing Dolly murder two of McGinty's hat boys, Ren believes there will be "no more bargaining with God" (177). Ren also continues to feel comforted by the familiarity of Catholicism, allowing Sister Agnes to pray with her hand on his head.
Superstition
Various superstitions thread through the minds of The Good Thiefs many characters. These thoughts situate the novel historically, in a time before widespread advances and belief in scientific knowledge, when people took superstition more seriously. The Good Thief includes some of 19th-century America's superstitions. Superstition holds that the second-born twin is unlucky but, as Brom and Ichy are orphans, no one knows which is the unlucky one. Not only do the children believe this but so do many adults, including the brothers who run the orphanage and Tom. Even Benjamin believes that Tom's adoption of the twins means "bad luck's going to follow" (209) them now.
The orphans also believe in the magical powers of rocks, like wishing stones. Sebastian, the orphan sold into the army, won’t let anyone hold the wishing stone because he is "afraid of losing his wish" (16). When Sebastian returns from the army, he tells Ren through the swinging door that someone had stolen the wishing stone from him as he slept, saying he should have "used it as soon as it came into" (16) his hands. Sebastian, who dies of starvation and exposure outside the orphanage, attributes his lack of luck to losing the wishing stone.
In the world of The Good Thief, superstition and religion are not exclusive. When Ichy replies that recent adoptee William doesn't need a prayer, Brother Joseph assures them everyone needs prayers, especially those to whom good things happen, because, as Brother Joseph explains, bad things always follow good things, and always in sets of three. This makes the boys "secretly glad" (12) and they begin to predict the bad things that might happen to William, including attacks by bees and wolves and contracting "the gout, the chicken pox, the plague" (12). Father Joseph curtails further discussion.
