78 pages • 2 hours read
George R. R. MartinA Dance With Dragons
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2011A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Perils of Power and the Cost of Duty
The price of power in A Dance of Dragons includes loneliness, distrust of others, and surrendering of individual wants and needs for the sake of getting that power. Characters like Daenerys Targaryen, Jon Snow, Tyrion Lannister, and Quentyn Martell grasp at power because of what it offers—the ability to refashion themselves and the world around them.
Daenerys Targaryen carries the weight of being the daughter of a powerful ruling family overthrown because of its excesses. In Meereen, she believes she can redeem the cruelty of her ancestors by being a “mother” to the formerly enslaved people of Meereen. She is a woman who wonders if her potential suitors desire her as a person or because of her power. She learns that getting and keeping power requires her to surrender her desire for Daario for a strategic marriage to Hizdahr, a sacrifice she makes because she believes a “queen belongs not to herself but to her people” (473). She has to surrender her self-identity as a merciful mother and liberator by shutting the gates against Astapori with the bloody flux and re-opening the slave pits in Meereen to maintain her position as queen because accommodating herself to being a foreign ruler who is a woman isn’t enough to allow her to keep her power in Meereen. She has a near miss with assassination, and reverting to what makes Targaryens powerful—they have dragons—saves her. She learns the lesson that being true to her roots is a surer path to power, but she must sacrifice what she initially believes to be right and a part of her identity before she can attain true power.
Jon Snow is faced with many of the same choices. Jon’s illegitimacy is written in his name—“Snow,” the name given to the children born out of wedlock of the nobility in Winterfell. In this book of the series, Jon struggles internally and externally with the notion that he is not good enough because of the circumstances of his birth. That sense of being a lesser Stark is one he carries with him from childhood. Antagonists to Jon in the Night’s Watch conflate his illegitimacy as a Snow with his illegitimacy as lord commander of the Night’s Watch. As a figure who lives in between roles and worlds, Jon attempts to answer these challenges to his power by relying on the values of his family and the role he occupies, with mixed results. Jon understands early on that he must “[k]ill the boy” (111) within himself to make political decisions like letting wildlings pass through the Wall and supporting Stannis as much as he can. These decisions please no one and they at times show Jon’s lack of cunning. By the end of his character arc in this volume, Jon pays the ultimate cost of power—death at the hands of people who believe he has chosen his family and values as a Stark over the Night’s Watch.
Both Quentyn Martell and Tyrion Lannister are in their own ways the inadequate scions of powerful families. Quentyn is an unremarkable young man in appearance and manner, but his family forces him to undertake a mission that would tax even a person with charisma. For Quentyn Martell, the price of power is going on a journey to Essos despite his desire to live an ordinary life kissing the sisters of one of his companions. He has grown up with stories of the Age of Heroes, when the people most responsible for the structure of power in Westeros were alive. He stays in Meereen after Daenerys disappears because he believes it is his duty to do so. Like many others, the cost of trying to live up to the idea of the prince who gains power through daring and bravery is death.
Tyrion Lannister has the opposite problem—both his appearance and mind are remarkable, but people underestimate him because he is a person with dwarfism. Tyrion is as ruthless and strategic as his father, but his family denigrates him because of his stature. To achieve power, Tyrion has to play into stereotypes about people with dwarfism and rely on soft power—using persuasion to convince Young Griff/Aegon that conquering Westeros (perhaps with Tyrion by his side) is a surer path to victory. Tyrion is certainly lonely at times, but he manages to survive life-threatening challenges and be a person of influence because he is cunning and good at manipulating those around him. At the end of the novel, many of the powerful and powerless characters have experienced reversals, which are influenced by the intimately entwined theme of revenge and betrayal.
Revenge and Betrayal
In A Dance With Dragons revenge and betrayal comprise a never-ending cycle that makes rulers ineffective and impoverishes the lives of people caught up in the cycle.
Daenerys Targaryen’s origin story is rooted in betrayal and revenge. Her presence in Meereen is the result of the betrayal of Aerys II, her father, by the Lannisters. As she attempts to consolidate her power in Meereen, she faces betrayal from her protectors, including Jorah Mormont and her husband Hizdahr. Her understanding of events and people around her is driven by a fear of more immediate betrayal because she believes in the prophecy that she will experience betrayal at the hands of three people close to her. Her fear of betrayal leads her to be a hesitant ruler when she should be more decisive. Her enemies and false allies—the Sons of the Harpy and Hizdahr, for example—attempt to kill her, but she survives by sheer chance. In Meereen, the cycle of betrayal followed by revenge is an endless one that destabilizes the political institutions of Essos.
Martin includes other characters who deal with the fallout from revenge and betrayal. Theon Greyjoy got his revenge for the slights he experienced as a ward of the Starks by taking Winterfell and ostensibly slaughtering two of the Stark children. By the time Theon appears in A Dance With Dragons, he is a shattered man. Ramsay Bolton uses Theon’s treachery as a pretext for his psychological and physical torture of Theon; while people disdain Ramsay for his actions, people who could help Theon or soften his captivity refuse to do so because they see pain as his due for his betrayal of the Starks. Theon’s inability to claim his birth name doesn’t come about until he redeems himself through an act of mercy—attempting to help Jeyne Poole escape Ramsay. The end result of entering the cycle of betrayal and revenge for Theon is his near destruction. Making amends starts him on the road to escaping that cycle.
Arya Stark embraces the obliteration of her identity for the sake of revenge. Like Daenerys, she lives a life shaped by the betrayals of others. She is powerless in many ways—a child and a girl in a society that treats both as negligible. Having lost her name, presented as a boy, and left behind Westeros, she devotes her entire life to vengeance by apprenticing herself to the Faceless Men. Even her prayers at night are of the list of people she hasn’t gotten around to killing yet. Arya receives instruction in killing as an art and service rather than for the satisfaction of revenge. Martin uses her blindness to show that her commitment to killing and revenge are not reasoned responses to the violence she has experienced. In her dreams, she is a night wolf who roams freely in the company of her packmates. In her waking life, she is a better, more efficient killer, but she is also “[n]o-one” (985). Arya refashions herself into a killer whose only purpose in life is vengeance, and it is an austere life for a child. These three characters find the fallout from being caught up in a cycle of revenge and betrayal to be crushing. Each must become something other than they intended to be to survive the consequences of betrayal and revenge.
The Weight of History and the Dangers of Prophecy
One of the draws of reading another volume of an epic fantasy like A Song of Ice and Fire is following the clues to figure out who is “the One”—the messiah, the figure charged with saving the world. In A Dance with Dragons, there are many characters who gain a sense of purpose and identity because they believe they are the One, but these characters are weighed down by history and what they think prophecy says about their futures.
Stannis Baratheon is a case in point. He is the brother of a king and has accepted Melisandre’s reading of prophecy. He believes that family history—being the brother of a man who boldly took the kingship during a time of upheaval—places him on the right side of history in the battle of kings in Westeros. Melisandre’s prophecy that he will be “the king who carried the fate of the world upon his shoulders, Azor Ahai reborn” (474) reinforces this self-belief. The problem for Stannis is that he lacks the charisma and shrewdness to be an effective military and administrative leader. His belief that family and prophecy make him the inevitable winner of a battle at Winterfell leads him to ignore the good advice of Jon Snow, who warns him that marching to Winterfell in the winter to lay siege to Winterfell is foolish. By the end of A Dance with Dragons, he is bearing the cost of not attending to the practicalities of the present. His army is bogged down in the long march to Winterfell and near revolt.
Daenerys is another character who makes impolitic moves because of her understanding of prophecy and history. When confronted with the many challenges of ruling Meereen, she constantly reminds herself that she is “the blood of the dragon” (1087), a self-description meant to bolster her confidence enough that she can lead a fractious Meereen. Being the descendent of the dragonlords of Old Valyria, now a smoking ruin, isn’t enough to make her good at her job. Daenerys’s self-confidence is misplaced. When more agile political operators advise her to go to Westeros, she stays until her position becomes untenable. When friends and foes alike warn her that the dragons are also a liability, she initially ignores them, although she suspects early on that she and her dragons may be “monsters” (184). She begins to exhibit the same suspicion of others that plagued her father, “Mad Aerys II” (327) because of the prophecy of the Undying of Qarth, an order of wizards who predicted that she would be “thrice betrayed” (42). While the priests of R’hllor proclaim Daenerys to be Azor Ahai reborn, her actions in the present show that she isn’t as skilled of a ruler. When rulers or would-be rulers like Daenerys and Stannis get too caught up in the past or too focused on what prophecy says about their future, the people who depend upon them suffer.
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