93 pages • 3 hours read
William BellCrabbe
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1986A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Digression-Journal EndChapter Summaries & Analyses
Digression Summary
In this digression, Crabbe thinks about people's intolerance of difference. He remembers that in school, people who were different and who refused to go along with the system were labeled as behavioral problems. Rather than being problems, these students were independent-minded, Crabbe thinks, a trait that made teachers see them as rebellious. Crabbe chose to conform to the system but wishes he had been more like them.
Crabbe also believes that the students themselves participate in enforcing conformity by attacking anyone who is different from them. He compares them to “a wolf pack, snarling and snapping at everything ‘alien’”(176).The viciousness with which students at his school treated an eccentric professor who rode an old bike to school, was vegetarian, and refused to drink alcohol illustrates this point for Crabbe. The teacher was naive enough to respond sincerely when students asked him questions about his values, earning their contempt and a cruel nickname (“The Veg”).
Because the teacher was different, they treated him as if he were crazy. Crabbe receives the same kind of attention from the hospital staff, he believes, because they label his difference and his wounds as strange. This is the reason why he believes he was made to go to therapy with Dr. Browne. He refuses, he says, “to end up in some boring article in a psych magazine” because of his refusal to conform, however (177).
Journal 22 Summary
A few days later, the police officer brings Crabbe's parents to visit him at the hospital. He notices that his parents look old and unkempt. For the first time, he thinks of his parents as “people who would get old,” which makes them more real in his eyes (179). He begins to cry with shame as he recalls the guilt he heaped on them. At first, he feels like he can't face them because the shame is so great, but his nurse, Ms. Owens, encourages him to go anyway because they need to understand that they are not at fault.
Nurse Owens also explains that she is a mother who has raised several children and is able to see that although Crabbe has some flaws, he is not such a bad person: “If you want to be a man you've got to get things straight between your parents and yourself first,” (181). When he complains that this sounds like his father’s lectures, she admits that some of what she says may well be “nonsense” (181). Nevertheless, she believes her advice is good since Crabbe is responsible for defining what it means to be a man, and that definition can be different from his father’s.
She compares the process of defining one’s own identity to that of a seed breaking through its shell: “when the shell split[s] from the force, well, that's a confusing and hurtful time,” and “[i]t's different for all of us, but we must all break free” (182). After this lecture, Crabbe accepts what she says and goes in to face his parents.
Journal 23 Summary
Far from being the idealized version of a reunion between parents and a son, the encounter between Crabbe and his parents is filled with tension. He asks his parents to sit down, and they are initially silent. His father tells him Dr. Browne thinks he should stay for another week. Crabbe responds by saying that he'll leave when he's ready. When his father begins to remonstrate with him, Crabbe interrupts him. His mother then asks if he will be coming home, a significant statement in Crabbe’s eyes because she seems to be assuming that he will be the one making the decision.
Crabbe recalls that Mary told him that “the person who cares least about a relationship controls it” (185). Although Crabbe realizes he could control the situation he decides not to because he doesn't want to hurt his parents more and because he wants “to be taken seriously” (187). Considering Nurse Owens and Mary's advice, he is honest with his parents when he tells them that he doesn't know what he wants to do yet. Crabbe’s mother cries as she recalls thinking he was dead, and his father cries as well, a sight that shocks Crabbe.
When his father asks what they did wrong, Crabbe explains that the problem wasn’t them but that he was “a rich, spoiled, mixed up, semi alcoholic teenager who couldn't find his ass with both hands” (187). When his father pushes for more answers, Crabbe explains that his affluence and intelligence actually made it harder for him to achieve autonomy. His successes were expected because of his social class, he believes, and his mistakes were seen as being his fault. While people saw him as “king of the world,” Crabbe saw himself as “just a goddam slave” (188). He ends by claiming control over his own life, a fact his parents will simply have to accept. They leave, and Crabbe feels satisfied, like he has put his house “in some sort of order” (188).
Journal End Summary
Crabbe signs himself out of the hospital a few days later. He has some difficulty getting used to sleeping indoors. He also thinks of Mary occasionally, and remarks that his “mother brought [him] into this world but Mary got [him] ready to live in it” (190). After a month of depression, Crabbe gets a job at a sheet metal plant where he works as a janitor, a job he gets in part because he asks about a picture of the interviewer canoeing on some rapids. Crabbe uses the money from his job to buy clothes and to contribute financially to his parents’ household.
He returns to the French River to retrieve the hidden station wagon. He also learns that his parents were worried while he was gone. He notices that they have removed the candelabra from their dining table, which he takes as an omen that it is time to share a general outline of what he experienced. Although the conversation does not end all the tension in their relationship, he feels that they have at last gotten away from some of the dysfunctional ways they used to communicate.
The novel closes with Crabbe accepting a position at a wilderness camp for troubled teenagers. He accepts the job in the hope that he may well be able to “do something good or at least try to” (192). He hopes, ultimately, that he can do “for someone what Mary did for him, on a smaller scale, of course” (192). He is confident that he can meet the demands of the wilderness.
Digression-Journal End Analysis
These sections of the novel include Crabbe’s completion of the final stages of his journey: the return home and facing the final ordeal. Crabbe, as represented in the digression, is a more reflective person with a better understanding of the pressure to conform and the fact that he did have a choice, even before he ran away, in how to respond to that pressure. He had the option to openly rebel, like the students he now recognizes as independent, but he chose to go along. Because he has a better understanding of his own identity and motivations, he makes a conscious decision to maintain control over his own narrative, refusing to have his story transformed into “some boring article in a psych magazine” (177).
His final ordeal is the encounter with his parents. While he initially attempts to avoid the ordeal in “Journal: 22,”Nurse Owens serves as a guide to help him return home when she echoes some of the lessons Mary taught Crabbe about choices and human nature. That he has internalized these lessons is underscored in “Journal: 23,”when he recognizes his parents as people existing outside of his need for them, humans with their own interior lives (179). He is able to be firm about his choices, despite his compassion for them and their desire for him to get back to the status quo.
Crabbe shows vulnerability to his parents when he shares that he does not know what he wants to do when he returns home (185) and shares his feelings about the difficulty of dealing with expectations and affluence (187), a way of interacting that he learned from Mary. In taking responsibility for his own actions and refusing to blame his parents, he shows that he is finally an adult. The resolution of the novel—his return to the wilderness as a professional mentor to young adults in search of their identities—adds symmetry to the narrative structure and represents a new stage of adulthood: a commitment to giving back to others.
