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.
Prologue-Journal 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary
This first page of the novel is an official document that includes basic information about Crabbe. This hospital chart from St. Bartholomew’s General Hospital identifies the date as November 15, identifies the patient as Franklin Crabbe, and lists details of his diagnosis, including “physical exhaustion,” “pneumonia,” “injury to left hand: two fingers amputated,” and “general evidence of exposure” (7).
Journal 1 Summary
The narrator, Franklin Crabbe, explains that he passes his time in the hospital by listening to the night sounds on the hospital ward and watching the highway. His boring daily routine is only relieved by his sparring with his psychiatrist, Dr. Browne. Crabbe does not want therapy and finds Browne to be ineffective. Crabbe observes that “[l]ike most grownups, he thinks teenagers are basically stupid and easily manipulated,” which Crabbe opposes with the idea that teenagers are actually deeply knowledgeable about their own feelings (11). Crabbe’s aim is to control his interactions with Browne.
He then describes his last session, during which Dr. Browne warns him about the dangers of smoking and asks him where he got the pipe Crabbe smokes during their sessions. Crabbe lies when he states that he read a scientific article that says pipe-smoking is less unhealthy than other forms of smoking and that he cannot remember where he got the pipe. Browne accuses Crabbe of selectively not remembering things and toying with him. Browne believes Crabbe’s poor physical shape when he arrived at the hospital indicates that something happened to him. Crabbe interrupts him to end the session, which angers the doctor. Franklin angrily accuses Browne of treating him like a small child and assuming he is a suicide then walks out the session.
Crabbe of the present day speculates that the sessions could have been helpful if Browne had been more competent and closes the entry by noting that some significant experiences can never be complete and remembered clearly until they are shared with another person. It is for this reason that he decided to keep the journal, which he is now sharing with the reader.
Prologue-Journal 1 Analysis
The hospital certificate of admission provides important context that raises the reader’s interest and gives details about the setting. While some basic information is included, other responses on the chart show gaps in the available information. These gaps and the sensational detail about the two amputated fingers naturally raise questions in the reader’s mind: who is Franklin Crabbe? Why is he in the hospital? What happened to his fingers? Why is so much information missing?
The hospital admissions chart also serves to preview an important theme in the novel: Crabbe’s quest for identity and autonomy. The reader discovers in the next chapter that the information is missing because Crabbe refuses to share it, in his effort to maintain control over his own narrative. The impersonal details included in the chart are how authority figures represent Crabbe, while the actual story that explains those injuries is a reality that emerges only through the highly-personal form of the journal.
“Journal: 1”is also part of the exposition of the novel and thus provides some characterization of the protagonist and his life before he goes to the wilderness. We learn that Crabbe is a teenager and that he is not “up on Fifth in the psycho ward” (10). His age is in keeping with the young adult fiction category and reinforces that he is likely a reliable narrator since he is mentally competent. His description of the confrontational encounters he has with Dr. Browne presage his deep distrust of and contempt for most adult authority figures, an idea to which he returns to throughout the novel, and reveal that the central event that set the narrative into motion is that he ran away from home.
The conflict with Dr. Browne also highlights two common themes in young adult literature: the quest for identity and the quest for autonomy. Crabbe struggles to assert control in his relationship with Dr. Browne, and fails to do so when he loses control over his emotions. His decision to write out his experiences represents an attempt to assume responsibility for his own narrative on his own terms, a struggle he must face to become an adult.
