“You have no idea what it was like. For us. The women, I mean. The wives.”

This quote by Tricia introduces one of the novel’s key themes: The Experiences of Women in Wartime. Absolution endeavors to shed a light on the unique experiences of military wives during the Vietnam War, with Tricia suggesting that women’s experiences have been overlooked.

“I’d noticed this before, among girls of her tribe: they knew an easy mark, a girl of lesser means who would be reflexively—genetically—disposed to do for her whatever she asked.”

Here, Tricia identifies herself as an “easy mark” for more domineering personalities due to her passiveness and working-class background. This quality will come to define her relationship with Charlene, to whom Tricia plays sidekick for much of the novel.

“But Saigon was still a lovely, an exotic, adventure (we’d also seen The King and I—in fact, I saw it four times)—and the cocoon in which American dependents dwelled was still polished to a high shine by our sense of ourselves and our great, good nation.”

In hindsight, Tricia acknowledges her own limited understanding and westernized perspective, raising the issue of Colonial Legacies and White Saviorism. Tricia and the other American dependents live in a gilded bubble, sheltered from the havoc of the war, and they are largely unaware of their complicity in the suffering and exploitation of the Vietnamese.