Six of Crows Essay Questions

In what ways does Six of Crows explore, or possibly push against, ideas of lawfulness and criminality?

The settings of the novel, Ketterdam and Djerholm, are starkly different cities, each with their own code of laws and ethics. In Ketterdam, the Merchant Council is a guiding body of the city, and even the citywide stadwatch guards work to protect individual merchants rather than the citizens at large. Crime is rampant, and casino/brothel owners have enormous influence over Ketterdam life. In Djerholm, drüskelle support conservative values, and leaders like Jarl Brum secretly experiment on and torture Grisha, using religious and social norms to maintain their power. The fact that the novel’s protagonists are young adults encourages criticism of these established systems—the adults have created a world where “lawfulness” is in many ways wrong, evil, and addictive, and must be pushed against. An argument can also be made that the issue is not with the established laws, but the perversion of laws that allow rampant criminality by the elite.

The crew has many repeated phrases used throughout the novel, such as “No mourners, no funerals” and Jesper’s jokes about Kaz’s “scheming face.” What does this repetition contribute to the novel?

Repeated phrases, like those used by the Dregs, are devices that quickly establish history and a sense of a fictional group’s culture. The crew’s adoption of certain in-jokes contributes to the reader’s understanding of their team spirit—especially dark repeated phrases that reinforce the real life-and-death risk they run every day. Inej muses that though the traditional farewell is said by all of the Dregs, for the crew, the saying is real; none of the heist crew has someone to mourn them except each other. These phrases also allow the reader to “join” the crew in a way—repetition allows us to predict and then participate in the crew’s final farewell: no mourners, no funerals.

Six of Crows talks often about monsters and monstrousness. Who or what do you find is the real monster of the story?

Many of the crew consider themselves or each other monsters (ex: Kaz’s reputation as Dirtyhands, and Matthias calling him demjin), but by the end of the novel they seem to have found the real monsters behind their initial fears. Matthias finds that Jarl Brum enjoyed “serving Fjerda” by capturing and killing Grisha—instead of sacrificing himself for his nation, he derives pleasure from his horrible deeds. Nina “becomes” a monster when she takes parem, and she realizes that her mentor, Zoya, is the same nightmare tale for Fjerdan children that Brum was for her. Inej—who perhaps considers herself monstrous, or at least inhuman, between being “the Wraith” and “the lynx”—confronts Heleen, the woman who profited from her human trafficking and repeated rape in the Menagerie. Jan Van Eck reveals that he has no love for his son at all, ordering him to be killed. On a symbolic level, monsters are everywhere: wolves, desert lizards, walls in the shapes of leviathans. Men like Pekka Rollins will defraud children and leave them for dead. Who, or what, is the “monster” at the end of Six of Crows, and what does that mean for the future of the crew?

Discuss the role of flashbacks in the narrative structure and storytelling.

In Part 3 of the novel, the group travels across the frozen Fjerdan landscape to Djerholm—that’s almost the entirety of the frame story until the end of the section. The meat of the section is its flashbacks, and the same is true for the rest of the novel—many of the emotional reveals occur in, or are thanks to, the in-depth flashbacks that explain the crew’s relationships, traumas, and desires. Leigh Bardugo discusses the challenges of writing the heist structure in an interview with Publishers Weekly, explaining that since the “heist” is a genre mostly in movies or television, putting it on the page requires a different approach. Perhaps the flashbacks are a literary concession to the heist genre’s reliance on visual representation, allowing the story to be fleshed out without interrupting the frame narrative’s straightforward structure.

Kaz believes that greed is a lever he can use—against others, with others, and to get what he wants. The members of the heist crew all have their own “levers” that get them to participate in the heist. What are those levers? What does a character’s lever tell us about their fatal flaw?

The concept of “levers”—i.e., information/traits used to influence or even blackmail—is up for debate, and no answer is strictly definitive. Some possibilities include the following:

Kaz is motivated by revenge and money, but his true lever is love: He loved Jordie, and he loves Inej, to the point he will 1) expose a mission to protect her and 2) ask his nemesis for help to get her back. Jesper’s lever is money—he is a gambling/risk addict—but that’s largely motivated by shame, hoping he can one day see his father again. Inej’s lever is her debt to Kaz, but her fatal flaw (which becomes her strength) is her relationship to her self and her autonomy, which she flips into a powerful determination to destroy slavers like the ones who took her. Wylan’s lever is respect, which he never got from his father; Nina’s lever is Matthias, and Matthias’s lever is his faith in his nation.

Bardugo describes planning Six of Crows and charting “how each of their fatal flaws was going to get in the way” of the heist. The lever forces the character into the heist, but the fatal flaw complicates its completion. Exploring the relationship between “lever” and “flaw” would be a fruitful topic for an essay.