Between Shades of Gray

While Lina’s mother is the representative of love in the novel, her father is the representative of “stand[ing] for what is right” (28). Kostas appears only once in the present time of the novel, but his appearances in Lina’s flashbacks illustrate his willingness to act morally regardless of the consequences. Indeed, one of the novel’s clearest messages is that if more people acted for the moral good, without fear of consequence, there would be less suffering for everyone, and regimes like Stalin’s would not become so powerful. On a smaller scale, if someone like Kretzsky had acted sooner in accordance with his own moral conscience, Elena might not be dead.

Though it is never confirmed, the text hints that the Vilkas’s next-door neighbor, Mrs. Raskunas, may have been the one to turn them in. She worked at the university with Kostas and she peered out of her window from behind a curtain on the night they were taken. Lina returns to this moment more than once, and the image of Mrs. Raskunas hidden away in the small space behind the curtain is an apt way to describe the smallness of her moral universe. Even if she was not the one to inform on them, she still hides from the enormity of the problem, making her complicit in its perpetuation.

Lina’s own version of both her parents’ morality is expressed through her art. If the purpose of art is to communicate, the question remains, what should art communicate? Before her deportation, Lina was clearly a gifted artist, but perhaps one without a purpose. She draws pictures of the stories she hears, her family’s portraits, a picture of the boy she likes, political cartoons. After they are taken to Siberia, her art acquires a purpose—to guide her father to them and to keep a record of what has happened to them. In Siberia, Lina’s art expresses truths that might otherwise be forgotten or never seen at all—from the truth of Ona’s death, for example, to the truth of what hatred does to the hater.