Oathbringer Chapter 73: Strategist

[!SPOILER WARNING] This analysis contains major spoilers for the entirety of Oathbringer. Read on only if you have finished the book or don't mind knowing key plot points.

Summary

Set eleven years in the past, this flashback chapter finds Dalinar at a mountain keep, teaching his twelve-year-old son Adolin about military strategy and defensive fortifications. Adolin is energetic and keenly interested in his father's work. A message from King Gavilar arrives, congratulating Dalinar on securing a treaty with Jah Keved but immediately assigning him a new, urgent task: quell the rebellion of Tanalan at the Rift, a mission Dalinar has already anticipated by studying the relevant maps.

The news shatters Evi's hopes for peace. In a painful argument, she confesses her profound misery after seven years of living in war camps, feeling culturally isolated among the Alethi and despairing that Dalinar neglects their son Renarin. Overwhelmed by her tears, Dalinar promises a year in Kholinar after the Rift campaign, but retreats from the emotional conflict to rejoin his generals, leaving Evi weeping and feeling a victory he does not truly understand.

Key Events

  • Dalinar shows Adolin a retractable stone ledge in a fortress, explaining its defensive use against Shardbearers.
  • He quizzes Adolin on the geography, recent treaty, and the strategic importance of legitimacy won through the conflict with the Vedens.
  • Adolin eagerly participates in tactics meetings, and Dalinar notes his own growth by having to vocalize his strategic reasoning.
  • Evi arrives and reminds Adolin of his geography lessons; he leaves after hugging her, a gesture Dalinar tolerates.
  • A scribe delivers Gavilar’s spanreed message, which praises Dalinar’s matured strategic genius but commands him to quell the rebellion at the Rift with Sadeas’s reinforcements.
  • Evi breaks down, revealing her seven-year-long unhappiness, her feelings of intellectual inferiority, and her sorrow that Dalinar ignores Renarin.
  • Dalinar admits he cannot win the emotional conflict, promises her a year of peace after the Rift, and retreats to continue his war planning.

Character Development

Dalinar

  • The Strategist and Father: This chapter highlights the matured Blackthorn. He has evolved from a simple warrior into a genuine strategist, teaching his son and earning the respect of Gavilar’s generals. His relationship with Adolin is a source of profound satisfaction, giving his life new purpose.
  • Emotional Blindness: Dalinar is acutely aware of his tactical prowess but remains utterly unequipped for emotional intimacy. He sees Evi’s tears as an unwinnable fight and retreats into military logic, mistaking a temporary domestic compromise for a strategic victory. His dismissal of Renarin’s condition shows a deep, culturally ingrained failure to value anything outside martial ability.

Evi

  • Isolation and Despair: Evi’s evolution is heartbreaking. She has conformed outwardly, wearing Alethi braids and trying to support her husband, but internally she is shattered. She feels unintelligent in Alethi social circles, mourns her lost homeland, and is tormented by the prospect of perpetual war. Her suggestion of visiting the Nightwatcher underscores her desperation to fundamentally change to fit in.
  • Moral Voice: She serves as the chapter's conscience, explicitly condemning the Alethi hypocrisy of shallow religious observance masking a culture of unending violence. Her plea for Renarin is a direct challenge to Dalinar’s values.

Adolin

  • Adolin’s youthful eagerness and aptitude for strategy are on full display. His cross-cultural habit of hugging his mother marks him as different from typical Alethi, a product of both his parents’ influences.

Themes, Symbols, or Motifs

  • The Failure of Legitimacy: Dalinar lectures Adolin that the true prize of war is political legitimacy, not just land. Ironically, the chapter shows him failing to establish “legitimacy” in his own home, where his wife’s entire existence is illegitimate by Alethi standards.
  • War as a Contest of Conversation: Evi explicitly states that for the Alethi, everything is a contest. This motif frames the entire chapter, from the literal war with the Vedens to the social combat among the women to the domestic war between husband and wife. Dalinar treats his marriage like a battle, retreating when he can’t find a winning tactic.
  • The Rift as Foreshadowing: The chapter ends with Dalinar planning his assault on Rathalas. His cold, strategic calculations here directly set the stage for the horrific atrocity he will eventually commit there, making this moment of domestic failure a crucial prelude to his greatest sin.
  • Shamespren and Retreat: When Dalinar flees Evi’s tears, shamespren fall “like flower petals.” This image powerfully captures his buried guilt. However, he suppresses it, rationalizing his retreat as a necessary tactical move, a pattern that will define him until his memory returns.

Why This Chapter Matters

This chapter is a pivotal flashback that crystalizes the dual nature of the pre-Nightwatcher Dalinar. It juxtaposes his peak as the “Strategist”—brilliant, respected, fulfilled by teaching his son—with his absolute nadir as a husband and father to Renarin. The intimate conflict with Evi lays bare the brutal cost of Alethi imperialism not on the battlefield, but on the family hearth. It shows that Evi’s plea for peace was not just an abstract moral stance but a cry from a woman being slowly crushed. By ending with Dalinar planning for the Rift while Evi weeps, the chapter masterfully ties his personal failures directly to the impending tragedy at Rathalas, highlighting how his strategic genius is indivisible from his catastrophic lack of empathy.

Study Questions and Answers

1. How does this chapter illustrate the central conflict between Dalinar’s public role and private life?

Dalinar is at the top of his game publicly, hailed by generals as a strategic genius and successfully mentoring Adolin. Privately, he is a complete failure. He cannot understand or comfort Evi, dismisses Renarin’s worth, and treats his wife’s profound emotional pain as an “unwinnable” battle to retreat from. The chapter argues that the same focus that makes him a great general renders him a disastrous husband; he can only interact with the world through the lens of military conflict.

2. What is the significance of Evi’s accusation that everything is a contest to the Alethi?

Evi’s accusation identifies a toxic cultural bedrock. For Dalinar and the Alethi, conversation, social standing, and even religious observance are competitive. This mindset reduces all relationships—including marriage—to contests with winners and losers. Dalinar proves her point perfectly by “retreating” from the argument and telling her she has “won this fight,” failing to grasp that she seeks connection, not victory. This cultural flaw is what ultimately leads to the brutality of the Rift, where “winning” becomes an absolute, monstrous act.

3. Why is Dalinar’s final promise to Evi and his subsequent retreat so critical to his character arc?

The promise to spend a year in Kholinar is a tactical concession, not an empathetic resolution. He still frames it as Evi having “won” a conflict. His retreat down the steps, accompanied by shamespren, reveals that deep down he knows he is in the wrong, but he consciously suppresses this shame to return to the comfort of military planning. This moment encapsulates the psychological mechanism that allows him to eventually commit the atrocities at the Rift: the ability to retreat from emotional truth and lose himself in the "simpler" morality of warfare.

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