Hatchet — Chapter 17

About This Passage

Three reasons. First, this passage contains the single concrete phrase that registers scale for the reader: 'the rivets in the aluminum.' Paulsen has been circling the plane for two chapters; here he finally names the physical materials of the thing Brian is trying to breach, and the naming collapses the dream-plane back into a hard manufactured object. The rivets matter because they are how the plane was built to NOT come apart. Second, Paulsen embeds a small Homeric touch — 'wrinkled as a prune' — inside a register of bone-level fatigue. The simile refuses to dramatize the labor; it domesticates it, making Brian more believable by making him more human. Third, the sentence is unusually long and unbroken, and the length itself enacts the two-hour duration Paulsen describes: the reader's breath is held across the clause exactly as Brian's effort was held across the lake. Copying this passage trains the student to notice how the rhythm of a sentence can imitate the rhythm of the experience it describes.

Narration Prompt

In seven or eight sentences, retell chapter seventeen for a peer. Include Brian's post-tornado rebuilding of the shelter and fire using his 'new skill,' the picture of the survival pack that arrives in Brian's sleep and changes the chapter's direction, the self-made rule 'first food, then thought, then action' that Brian deliberately tests against his own impatience, Brian's reconstruction of the raft after smooth logs fail — the insight that weaving from limbed treetops (the same skill he used for the wall, the food shelf cover, and the fish gate) is the solution, the sunset-beauty passage and the 'reverse question' Brian asks himself, the tattered-windbreaker rope that lets Brian tie Brushpile One to the plane, Brian's interior 'Stop now. Stop that thinking.' as he refuses to keep picturing the dead pilot, and the chapter's stark closing line — 'He was blocked.'

Discussion Questions

1. Brian installs a self-rule — 'first food, because food made strength; first food, then thought, then action' — and then deliberately stages an opportunity to violate it: the plane pack, which is the most exciting prospect of the novel so far. Examine the rhetorical architecture of this rule. What is Paulsen gaining by giving us a rule AND the temptation to break it in the same chapter, and what would be lost if Brian had simply eaten the fish without the internal reminder?
2. Brian's raft-breakthrough comes from remembering that weaving — used for the wall, the food shelf cover, and the fish gate — is not three tricks but one skill. Paulsen specifically lists all three earlier applications. Why does Paulsen use an itemized list for the recognition, and what is the author claiming about how mastery actually accumulates?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide