46 pages • 1 hour read
Lauren TarshisI Survived The Shark Attacks Of 1916
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2010A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Role of Friendship in Overcoming Adversity
Friendship plays a key role in the I Survived series. Through his experiences with the shark attack, Chet learns that he can overcome adversity and survive when he trusts others. Chet initially struggles to connect with others or trust that people want him in their life. His insecurities intensify after his new friends play a prank on him at the water, staging a fake shark attack and leaving Chet humiliated. After his retaliation prank fails and drives a further wedge between Chet and his friends, Chet goes as far as to suggest that he should just run away to California to rejoin his parents, once again abandoning a chance at a stable life in Elm Hills. Uncle Jerry convinces Chet that overcoming adversity requires staying put and building a sense of belonging: “A person has to face up to things. You never solve anything by running away” (51). Chet shows that he has internalized this lesson when he jumps into the water to save Sid during the shark attack. Chet sustains an injury to his leg in the process, but in return his friends help save his life by pulling him out of the mouth of the shark.
In the hospital after the attack, Sid, Monty, and Dewey visit Chet, and the boys apologize for their previous actions. Chet realizes that “he and the guys would always be tied together. By the terrible things they’d seen. By what they’d done for each other” (85). Chet and his friends face their fears and overcome their anger at each other to save one another at a critical moment, illustrating that friendship is key to overcoming adversity.
At the end of the text, Chet falls asleep and dreams of a day in the future, when he is an old man, surrounded by a group of young boys, telling them the story of the shark attack. The scene echoes the one earlier in the text in which Captain Wilson details his own experience with a shark. Here is where Chet’s story deviates, illustrating that he is no longer worried about being that “tiny speck in the middle of the ocean” because of his friends (20): “But in the end, the beast couldn’t get him. Because his friends had reached out for him. They’d held him tight. And they never let him go” (87). Unlike Wilson, Chet was not alone in his time of need and was able to rely on the power of friendship to survive. Chet did not survive by himself but rather overcame his adversity with help from those he cares about, and who care about him in turn.
The Difficulty of Changing Public Perception
I Survived the Shark Attacks of 1916 illustrates how much it takes to change public perception about something, to the point that several people die before many people believe that sharks can hurt humans. When the boys first bring news of the shark attack, Uncle Jerry dismisses the claims as nonsense: “[A] shark simply will not attack a human. That cherry pie over there is more likely to attack you than a shark is” (11). The comparison to the “cherry pie” is whimsical; it contrasts with the violence of the shark attacks and highlights how far the pendulum has to swing before public perception changes. Uncle Jerry’s statement represents the overarching attitudes of the time, since he believes that sharks are “easily scared, with jaws too weak to do real damage to a human” (88). These misconceptions were not only incorrect, but dangerous, and potentially led to additional attacks taking place as the population at the time was reluctant to take them seriously.
When Chet experiences his own first encounter with the shark, after multiple other attacks have occurred, the townspeople meet him with incredulity and laughter: “Mr. Colton offered a sympathetic smile and a hand on his shoulder. ‘It’s the heat, my boy. It’s driving us all a little mad’” (61). Even with multiple newspaper articles written about the recent attacks, close to the Matawan Creek where Chet encounters the shark, those around him are still clinging to their misconceptions about the dangers of sharks. Tarshis provides further historical context in the afterward about why misconceptions about sharks were so pervasive at the time: “There were no real marine biologists in those days, no scuba gear or submarines for underwater exploration. There had never been close studies of sharks, just stories passed down over generations” (89). Because of the rarity of shark attacks on humans, and the lack of education and knowledge about sharks in general, misconceptions proliferated within the population. A few eyewitness accounts and newspaper articles are not enough to change public perception; Tarshis suggests that people need multiple messages and a litany of evidence to have their minds changed.
As with all the historical events that shape the I Survived series, the 1916 New Jersey shark attacks “shocked America and shattered false ideas about sharks” (90). No longer were sharks thought of as tame creatures, too weak to enact harm, but seen as potentially lethal predators. In the text, it takes the deaths of four people and the grave injury of another to finally shift the public’s knowledge that sharks do have lethal potential.
The Intersection of Human Activity and the Natural World
A central theme of I Survived the Shark Attacks of 1916 is the intersection of human activity and the natural world. Though humans often consider themselves the top of the food chain, the events of the novel illustrate that human dominion over the natural world is not a guarantee.
The intersection of human activity and the natural world within the text often results in disastrous outcomes for humans. The first example of this is when Captain Wilson tells the boys about his encounter with a shark after a terrible storm: “By the time the sun came up, the storm had passed. I was all alone. Just a tiny speck in the middle of the ocean” (14). By calling himself a “speck,” Wilson evokes the vastness of the ocean in comparison to himself, how miraculous his survival was not only of the storm, but the shark attack as well. This suggests that human activity is actually insignificant compared to the power of nature.
The shark attacks of 1916 take place against the backdrop of a heat wave in July. The heat adds to the unsettled mood of the text, adding increasing pressure to the heat-weary residents of coastal New Jersey and sending them into peril in the water: “It was another scorching day, the hottest yet [...] Uncle Jerry decided to close the diner early. All the ice in the restaurant had melted. The milk had curdled. You could just about cook a flapjack on the kitchen floor” (53). The heat, itself an aspect of nature, influences all human activity and makes the intersection of human activity and the natural world inevitable. After Chet finishes cleaning the remnants of his failed prank off the dock, he “was so hot that he decided to take a longer swim” (54). This swim places Chet directly in the path of the shark, forcing their interaction and Chet’s near miss.
The causes of the 1916 shark attacks remain unknown. In the novel’s afterword, Tarshis posits that “[p]erhaps some unusual ocean or weather conditions had attracted sharks to the shore areas, where they tragically crossed paths with swimmers” (91). Tarshis is careful to emphasize that “shark attacks are extremely rare” (91), and she goes on to suggest that humans pose an even greater threat to sharks: “Every year, humans kill nearly 100 million sharks, mainly for their fins [...] Many shark species are endangered” (94). In contrast, in 2008 there were only 118 shark attacks recorded, and 4 deaths attributed to sharks worldwide (93). This suggests that, since the 1916 shark attacks, shark and human interaction has only increased as human travel, exploration, and exploitation of the ocean has expanded, resulting in far greater negative outcomes for the natural world than for humans.
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