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.
Themes
The Quest for Identity and Autonomy
As is common in young adult literature, the novel Crabbe emphasizes the difficulty of the passage from childhood to adulthood. The novel represents the challenges adolescents and young adults face, including how to define their own identities despite the expectations of adults and institutions, clarifying what their values are in the face of pressures to conform from adults and institutions, and navigating important challenges related to substance abuse, mental health, and sexuality.
Crabbe’s character arc in the novel is one that follows the expected pattern for a coming-of-age narrative. At the start of the events recounted in his journal, Crabbe is confused and angry because he feels that the life he is living is not a meaningful one. A big source of his discontent is that all the important decisions in his life are made by his teachers and parents, with no reference to his own desires or values: he lacks autonomy. Before going to the wilderness, his responses to this lack of autonomy are self-destructive ones, like drinking too much or going along with expectations because doing so appears to be the easy way out.
During his time in the wilderness, however, he learns constructive ways to respond to these expectations and pressures. More importantly, he learns that it is up to him to assert his own will when it comes to making important decisions about his life and figuring out what his values are. By the end of the novel, Crabbe has grown more comfortable with stating what his needs are and being accountable for living a life in accord with his own values, even when authority figures disapprove. His decision to take the job at the wilderness camp is the last step in his assertion of autonomy and responsibility to others.
Crabbe also faces identity struggles that are common to young adulthood, including his abuse of alcohol, his anxiety, and interpersonal relationships, especially romantic ones. It takes his time in the wilderness, away from alcohol, for him to understand that it is a crutch that he uses to treat his anxiety. Because of his time in the wilderness, he gains some insight about what causes his anxiety and how best to manage it through reflection, physical activity, and smoking his pipe, which is presented as a comparatively less destructive habit in the novel. In his relationship with Mary, he learns how to relate to another person as an adult. Mary firmly rebuffs his romantic interest in her, and his graceful and respectful response to that rejection is a mark of his growing maturity. His willingness to respect her privacy with regards to the pack containing details about her life demonstrates his understanding of the importance of boundaries within relationships. Finally, his willingness to see his parents as real people, not just as providers of his material comfort, is also a sign of his adult identity.
The Relationship between Humanity and Nature
Crabbe’s changing relationship to the Canadian wilderness is used to develop the theme of the relationship between humanity and nature. Crabbe’s initial ideas about nature are highly romanticized. He thinks that when he runs away to the wilderness, he will be able to escape all his problems back home in the city of Toronto, and he also associates nature with absolute freedom from responsibility and constraint. His ideas about nature are derived in part from popular culture, and also the culture of Canada. He mentions at one point having seen pictures of men easily carrying canoes out in the wilderness. He also mentions feeling at one point like a coureurs de bois, a runner of the forest, a figure out of the early history of Canada who helped advance European settlement of the wilderness as fur trappers and liaisons with indigenous people who lived in the wilderness. None of these notions of nature are realistic or contemporary, however.
Crabbe is nearly killed by a black bear in the early chapters of the novel simply because he is not aware that is it is the season in which bears come out of hibernation and because he lacks knowledge of how to live with nature, such as the fact that crumbs and food at a campsite will attract wild animals. Not paying attention to how you interact with nature can be fatal, a point that becomes even more clear when Crabbe almost kills himself by going down a river he has not previously mapped:
Growing up in the city, I had a very idealistic attitude toward old Ma Nature, like: the wilderness is a beautiful, peaceful place, populated with cute little birds and noble animals. Well, that's bunk. So is the opposite notion, that nature is a monster-mother full of traps and vicious violence. The truth is nature is just there(94).
Because of his time with Mary in the wilderness, Crabbe has come to understand that the indifference of nature requires “working with the environment and not against it” (95) to survive. This lesson is driven home by his loss of two of his fingers to frostbite. The larger implication of his changing relationship with nature is that separation from nature makes humanity weak, while an awareness of our relationship to it can make us stronger and better able to survive.
The Value(s) of Education
Several kinds of education are presented in the novel. There is the formal education that most people experience for the first twelve to thirteen years of their lives, and then there is the more informal education that people gain from relationships with mentors and practical experience in real-life contexts. Crabbe’s representation of that more formal kind of education in the novel is negative. The problem that he has with this more formal kind of education is that doesn't require any critical thinking skills and emphasizes values like conformity over independence, rewarding the first and punishing the latter. Instead of preparing young adults for full-blown adulthood, such an education merely teaches an intolerance for difference, a point Crabbe makes multiple times in the digressions that pepper the novel. In such an educational system, “[n]obody accepted the kids is right to set their own values. So the teachers came down on them. And that only made them more rebellious” (175). The students produced by such an educational regime “are like a wolf-pack, snarling and snapping at everything ‘alien’” (176). Bell’s portrayal is an indictment of the traditional education system.
Crabbe’s relationship with Mary and his education in wilderness craft offer an alternative, both in terms of the means of education and the values that it teaches. Crabbe is willing to learn from Mary in the context of having a warm, trusting, personal relationship with her. He listens to her because there is an immediate and meaningful application for what she is teaching him, not because of her authority over him as an adult. Her educational approach allows him to practice what she has taught in an authentic setting and provides just enough support to accomplish his task, as is the case with the compass school test. This approach is one that emphasizes positive values by rewarding autonomy, persistence, and critical thinking. Bell’s portrayal of this approach to education and the impact it has on Crabbe’s life implies that values communicated by the educational approach are just as important as the content taught.
Actions versus Words
An important part of Crabbe’s struggle in the novel is his effort to make his actions align with his words. For example, when Crabbe discusses the short story “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner,” he sees the protagonist of that story as a model for choosing actions over words:
Words are too easy to ignore, misunderstand, or twist around. Sometimes you have to act and sometimes so dramatically that people are stunned, stopped in their tracks...like the runner I wanted to do something that would symbolize what I thought and how I felt(18-19).
Crabbe, who at one point describes himself as inarticulate, has every reason to distrust words, especially since the adults in his life say one thing—don’t abuse substances and live up to your potential—but very frequently do the exact opposite themselves. His belief in actions over words persists throughout the novel.
Despite the belief in action over words, Crabbe does come to understand the importance of words later in the narrative. Literature, composed of words, is clearly part of how Crabbe understands the world. Crabbe’s memory of the protagonist’s death as a result of exposure in Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” saves him from making the fatal mistake of giving in to his desire to sleep once he becomes cold in the blizzard(162), and his decision to keep a journal is motivated by his understanding that language, especially the creation of narratives like the journal, is a technology for making meaning out of memories and sharing experience (19). The importance of words, especially by the end of the narrative, implies that Bell sees a place for both words and actions as parts of human experience.
