Hatchet — Chapter 1

Narration Prompt

In five to seven sentences, reconstruct the chapter's arc — Brian Robeson's divorced-shuttle flight to the Canadian oil fields, the interior monologue built around the words 'Divorce' and 'The Secret,' the mother's gift of the hatchet, the pilot's progressive cardiac collapse, and the final reduction of the page to the single word 'Alone.'

Discussion Questions

1. Paulsen is often read as a survival-novelist, but Chapter 1 contains no survival — only a divorce, a drive, a flight, and a death-in-progress. Reading this as an opening, how does the author argue that the interior plot (Brian's unresolved knowledge about his mother, his anger, his grief) is the necessary precondition for the exterior plot that has not yet begun? What kind of novel does this first chapter promise, and what kind does it refuse?
2. The Secret — what Brian knows about his mother that he believes caused the divorce — is withheld from the reader throughout the chapter and, as many readers of the series know, is slowly disclosed only in later books. Consider the ethical stakes of Paulsen's decision to make a child the keeper of an adult's moral secret. What does the author ask of the reader by placing us inside Brian's refusal to speak, and what does it cost him — and us — to remain inside that refusal?

+ 2 more questions in the complete study guide