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    A Study Guide for Edwidge Danticat's "Dew Breaker"
    A Study Guide for Edwidge Danticat's "Dew Breaker"
    A Study Guide for Edwidge Danticat's "Dew Breaker"
    Ebook37 pages26 minutes

    A Study Guide for Edwidge Danticat's "Dew Breaker"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Edwidge Danticat's "Dew Breaker," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJun 15, 2016
    ISBN9781535821872
    A Study Guide for Edwidge Danticat's "Dew Breaker"

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      A Study Guide for Edwidge Danticat's "Dew Breaker" - Gale

      09

      The Dew Breaker

      Edwidge Danticat

      2004

      Introduction

      The Dew Breaker (2004) is a novel by Edwidge Danticat, an American writer who was born in Haiti. Haiti is a small, impoverished country that occupies the western third of the island of Hispaniola; Haiti is bordered by the Dominican Republic, which occupies the eastern two-thirds of the island. Haiti is located in the Caribbean Sea between Cuba and Puerto Rico, and is 700 miles from the coast of Florida.

      The Dew Breaker consists of nine linked stories. The stories are set either in the Haitian-American community in New York, or in Haiti during the time of the brutal dictatorships of François Duvalier, known as Papa Doc, and his son, Jean-Claude Duvalier, who ruled Haiti from 1957 to 1986, during which time thousands of people were tortured and killed. The torturers, members of the Duvaliers' militia known as the Tonton Macoutes, were also known as dew breakers because of their practice of coming for their victims before dawn. The novel focuses on one dew breaker in particular, a man who committed horrible crimes in Haiti in the 1960s and who has since lived an unremarkable life in New York with his wife and daughter. But as the novel shows, the crimes he committed have left a terrible legacy that still haunts the Haitian-American community in New York so many years later. Is it possible that he could ever be forgiven or redeemed? Danticat's subtle treatment of this theme makes The Dew Breaker a compelling exploration of the mind of a torturer and the limits of compassion.

      Author Biography

      Edwidge Danticat was born January 19, 1969, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, to poor parents. When Danticat was two years old, her father immigrated to the United States, working as a taxi driver in New York. Two years later, Danticat's mother joined her husband in New York, leaving Danticat and her younger brother Eliab to be raised by their uncle. In 1981, when Danticat was twelve, she joined her parents in New York.

      Raised speaking Creole and French, Danticat learned English by reading the works of African-American novelists such as James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Alice Walker. As a recent immigrant attending a high school in Brooklyn, she felt isolated from her classmates and took to writing about her homeland as a

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