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Copywork
About This Passage
This passage was chosen because it is the darkest moment in the novel — Paulsen's account of Brian's suicide attempt the night after the plane disappeared — and because Paulsen commits to narrating it plainly rather than euphemistically. The passage also clusters four vocabulary words (gutted, settled, funk, madness) in a retrospective register that is separate from the triumphant voice elsewhere in the chapter. Reading this passage first makes the chapter's later 'tough hope' recognizable as a real achievement rather than a cheerful declaration.
When the plane had come and gone it had put him down, gutted him and dropped him and left him with nothing. The rest of that first day he had gone down and down until dark. He had let the fire go out,...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Summarize chapter thirteen in a paragraph. Include Brian's wolf encounter, his retrospective account of the dark night after the plane turned away, his bow-making mistakes, his discovery that water refracts light, his first fish, and his conclusion that he is 'full of tough hope.'
Discussion Questions
- Paulsen opens with 'Brian watched the water, smelled the water, listened to the water, was the water.' The shift from watching to BEING the water is the novel's strongest claim about Brian's reorganized perception. Is Paulsen describing a mystical or quasi-religious state, or is he describing a secular ecological attention that happens to look mystical to readers who have not felt it? What is at stake in the distinction?
- Brian dates his new self from the morning after the plane, not from the crash itself, saying '42 days since he had died and been born as the new Brian.' Why does Paulsen let Brian claim a death-and-rebirth vocabulary for what is, strictly speaking, a psychological change? Is this language accurate to the experience, or is it dramatic inflation?
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
Emptied of something essential — used figuratively for a person emotionally hollowed out by loss.
Item 2
Sank into a state or position with a sense of finality or acceptance.
Item 3
A state of depression, cowardice, or low spirits, often prolonged.
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Critical Thinking
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