50 pages • 1 hour read
Karen RussellSwamplandia
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2011A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “The Beginning of the End”
Content Warning: This section of the guide describes and discusses the source text treatment of the sexual assault of a minor.
Ava Bigtree’s family owns and operates Swamplandia!, a reptile theme park located in the Ten Thousand Islands on the edge of the Florida Everglades. She lives there with her father Chief Bigtree, brother Kiwi, and sister Osceola (Ossie). Although struggling, it was once a popular tourist attraction, drawing pale, “sweaty” visitors from all across the United States. Swamplandia! features pythons, caimans, lizards, and even a rescued bear, but the star attraction is the family’s collection of alligators. Ava’s mother Hilola had, when she was alive, performed in a nighttime show called “Swimming with the Seths” (All 91 of their alligators are named Seth), which called for her to dive into the compound’s gator pit and swim, by starlight and spotlight, through gator-infested waters, to the edge of the pond. Hilola’s act was popular with the park’s visitors, and Hilola herself had been deeply loved by her family. Everyone was devastated when she fell ill, and Ava recalls the cancer progressing quickly. She died just before Ava turned 13.
After Hilola’s death, the park began to struggle. Initially, many visitors were disgruntled about the lack of a headlining show. No one seemed as interested in gator wrestling as they had been in “Swimming with the Seths.” Eventually, attendance began to dwindle. Swamplandia! was further threatened by the opening of a new theme park nearby, “The World of Darkness,” which featured a large, slide-like ride called “The Tongue of the Leviathan.” As fewer and fewer families visit Swamplandia!, more and more groups of men looking to drink and party begin to frequent the park. They are difficult, disrespectful visitors, and their numbers are not great enough to financially sustain Swamplandia!. The family is in dire straits.
Chapter 2 Summary: “The Advent of the World of Darkness”
Attendance continues to decline, and Ava and her siblings are left with more free time than they have ever had. There is a library boat nearby from which Ava, Kiwi, and Ossie check out The Spiritist’s Telegraph, a book on witchcraft that inspires them to create a Ouija board so that they can try to contact their mother. Ossie throws herself into her supernatural book. This kind of studiousness is atypical for her. It is their brother Kiwi who enjoys learning, and although the children have been loosely homeschooled, Kiwi designed a more rigorous course of study for himself and is planning to take the SATs so that he might be able to skip high school and proceed directly to college.
Osceola turns 16 and the family throws her a party, although without their mother and grandfather (who had recently been moved to an assisted living facility on the mainland) the mood is somber. No one is able to find a nice gift for Osceola, and everyone is aware of how underwhelming their attempts must seem. After the party, Osceola leaves to go on a walk. The Chief tells the remaining children his plan for saving the park, which includes modernization and spending 25,000 dollars on saltwater caiman. Ava and Kiwi are dubious. Osceola returns very late that night and continues to moodily consult The Spiritualist’s Telegraph frequently.
Chapter 3 Summary: ‘Osceola K Bigtree in Love”
Osceola continues to fixate on ghosts and spiritualism, and she commandeers the use of the Ouija board. Disappointed in her inability to get a response from the spirit of their mother, she begins to use the board to try to contact potential boyfriends. Although their father dismisses her romantic seances as a stage of puppy love that all young girls go through, Kiwi and Ava are more worried. They find her preoccupation with the ghosts of dead, but somehow dateable men alarming, and wonder if her interest in spiritualism might have more to do with her mother than with her desire to find a boyfriend. Their father, meanwhile, launches a campaign of what he terms “Carnival Darwinism” to modernize Swamplandia!, and he begins training Ava in advanced gator wrestling techniques.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Ava the Champion”
Ava intends to enter the same alligator wrestling contest that her mother had once won, although she is still 13 and all contestants must be 18. She writes, explaining who her mother had been, and asking the contest holders to make an exception. She recalls her mother’s storied career wrestling gators: She’d married their father and begun working with alligators when she was just 19. Although the children generally assumed that their mother was happy, she’d once made Ava and Osceola promise not to marry before the age of 30.
The Bigtree family owns a set of incubators, and every year they hatch a new bunch of alligators. One of them is born with unusual, red skin, and although Ava is sure that it will die, she manages to keep it alive. She does not tell her family about the red alligator initially, superstitiously believing that if she reveals her “lovely ruby girl” to the others, that the young gator will fall ill (61).
The Chief takes his children to the mainland to visit their grandfather Sawtooth. He’d originally been sent to the care facility (which is a boat, permanently anchored in the harbor) because he’d bitten someone, but so far his stay on the mainland has been uneventful. They visit with Sawtooth for a while, and then their father speaks to him alone. When he meets up with his children again, he is visibly upset. Kiwi speculates that he’d been asking Sawtooth for money, but the Chief claims to have been asking for advice about the future of Swamplandia!
Chapter 5 Summary: “Prodigal Kiwi”
Back at Swamplandia!, both Ava and Kiwi are worried. Ava notices that Kiwi has grown thinner and realizes that no one really eats healthily now that their mother is gone. She also notices that her sister (presumably) has stolen their mother’s wedding dress from its glass case in their display room. Kiwi does not seem to find the dress theft as alarming as his sister, but he is agitated about the amount of debt their family has incurred. He realizes that there is no way for their father to invest in Swamplandia! when there is such a proliferation of unpaid bills and understands that “Carnival Darwinism” is doomed. Kiwi wants to leave the island so that he can go to high school on the mainland, but Ava wants to remain in their home and thinks that their mother would have wanted their family to stay at Swamplandia! too. Kiwi points out that their mother is no longer living, and that Ossie’s bizarre preoccupation with ghosts has gotten out of hand. Ava surprises herself by defending her sister, arguing that she has seen Ossie have a kind of fit at night and believes her sister to be possessed by actual spirits. The next morning, Kiwi is gone. He has left a note explaining his intention to find some kind of solution to the family’s financial woes. The Chief, too, decides to leave. He hopes to find investors or to secure other funding for Swamplandia! He sets out for Loomis, on the mainland.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Kiwi’s Exile in the World of Darkness”
Kiwi has obtained a janitorial position at the World of Darkness park in Loomis. He makes friends with Vijay and Yvans, two other workers. Most of the staff has begun to jokingly refer to Kiwi as Margaret Mead because someone found a copy of a Margaret Mead book in his locker. During his third week on staff, Kiwi accidentally breaks the vacuum cleaner and is sneered at by the manager Carl, a “mainland nerd” who works at the park in spite of having a master’s degree and who is fond of fantasy novels about orcs featuring scantily clad, large-breasted women on the covers. Kiwi lives in the available staff housing, which although small and spare, comes in handy as he has nowhere else to go and only a meagre salary. Although Kiwi desperately wants to apply to college, he learns that the atmosphere at the World, as its employees call it, is not conducive to genius, school, or studying, and he learns to keep his hopes and plans quiet. Kiwi is erudite and his vocabulary sets him apart from his co-workers. He quickly learns to use more rudimentary terminology, not to quote poetry, and to hide his keen intellect. He begins to spend more and more time alone and even begins eating his lunch in the bathroom. The park is a far cry from the fierce competitor his father had thought it to be. It is in a woeful state of disrepair, and Kiwi wonders if the move from Swamplandia! to the World has really been progress. He researches the college application process and hopes to take his SATs soon.
Chapters 1-6 Analysis
This first set of chapters introduces readers to the Bigtree family and to Swamplandia!, their alligator-themed tourist attraction. It begins to develop the importance of Grief and Loss as well as Environmental Destruction as themes. It showcases the complexities of familial bonds and the characterization of each family member, and begins to showcase the Coming of Age process, particularly for the character of Kiwi.
The novel begins with an introduction to Swamplandia! and an account of the untimely death of Hilola Bigtree. The park’s star performer, mother to Kiwi, Osceola, and narrator Ava, and wife to the Chief, Hilola had been a figure beloved by her family and renowned by park visitors. Each of her family members struggles in the wake of her death, and although these early chapters focus on the first stages of grief, readers begin to understand that learning how to process and move on from the loss of Hilola will become an important part of each character’s development. Osceola most overtly embodies the theme of Grief and Loss in this section of the text, especially after she happens across The Spiritist’s Telegraph in the abandoned library boat. It is a guide to spiritualism and the occult, and a symbol of her unresolved feelings of loss. Once she finds it, she begins to try to contact Hilola, and when she is unsuccessful, she channels her grief into an unhealthy, obsessive coping mechanism: trying to contact the spirits of other dead people. Ava and Kiwi rightly worry that Osceola’s fixation speaks to her inability to process her feelings, and that even when she tries to contact other ghosts, her interest in the occult is ultimately about her mother.
The Chief comes into focus the most sharply in these chapters through his own fixation with “Carnival Darwinism,” which is what he has christened his quest to modernize and improve the park. He, too, is struggling in the wake of his wife’s death, and like his daughter Osceola, channels his grief into other avenues. Kiwi alone recognizes the futility of the Chief’s plans, understanding better than his father that the family can neither afford the investments needed to improve the park nor hope to generate enough new tourist interest if they do modernize. Because he wants to help his family and to pursue his own goal of obtaining a formal education, Kiwi sets off for the mainland and finds a job at Swamplandia!’s main competitor: a park called the World of Darkness. Although his Coming of Age journey will come into greater focus in the later chapters, readers can understand at this point in the novel that for Kiwi, “coming of age” will mean accessing education, building a career, and helping his family.
Environmental Destruction also emerges as an important theme, largely through the novel’s early interest in setting. The Bigtree family theme park is located in the Ten Thousand Islands, a swampy swath of mangroves and islets that runs the length of Florida’s southwest coast, merging with the Everglades as it reaches the bottom of the peninsula. Ava observes that
Swamplandia! had been under siege from several enemy forces, natural and corporate, for most of my short lifetime. We islanders worried about the menace of the melaleuca woods, the melaleuca, or paperbark tree, was an exotic invasive species that was draining huge tracts of our swamp to the northeast. And everybody had one eye on the sly encroachment of the suburbs and Big Sugar in the south (7-8).
She points out that it is not only mainland tourism and development that threaten the Ten Thousand Islands and Swamplandia!, but the introduction of invasive species meant at one point to turn the entire coastal, lowland region into land better suited for farming. This theme will run through the entire novel, and grounds it within a long and storied tradition of Florida literature, much of which focuses, at least in part, on the environmental destruction of Florida since colonization.
Ava’s characterization is another key focus in this section. Like Kiwi, she hopes to help her family save the park, but at this point in the story she thinks that she can do so through entering alligator wrestling competitions. She is too young to compete, but she wonders if her parentage will convince the contest organizers to bend the rules for her. Still only 13, Ava has not yet begun to think in realistic terms, and never even works out how much money the park needs or how much she herself can hope to generate. This kind of youthful, inexperienced thinking will characterize many of her early decisions, and Coming of Age for Ava’s character will ultimately mean learning how to be more careful and circumspect in her choices. She is also shown to be introspective in these early chapters, and much of her narration focuses on memories of her mother. She realizes now that Hilola, who married at the young age of 19, had perhaps not been entirely happy with the Chief, and she remembers Hilola once telling her and Osceola not to marry before the age of 30. This shows Ava beginning to understand that Hilola and the Chief are, in addition to being her parents, also fully formed and complex individuals in their own right. This, too, is an important part of coming of age for many adolescents, and it is one of the early lessons that Ava learns in her own path towards maturity and self-discovery.
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By Karen Russell
