64 pages • 2 hours read
Michael NorthropTrapped
Fiction | Novel | YA | 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. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 38-41
Chapter 38 Summary
Weems continues on, even though he feels like a “numb engine chugging slowly along” (221). He sees a man skiing and gets irrationally angry at him for making better progress through the snow. Weems follows the skier until he can’t see him anymore, and then stops. He smells a wood fire burning and knows getting there is his only chance, but his “legs had stopped, and they were not going to start again” (224). He passes out in the snow.
Chapter 39 Summary
Lying in the snow, Weems hears a loud noise and sees a bright light. He’s sure it’s “an angel, come for me at the end” (226).
Chapter 40 Summary
Weems lies still waiting for the angel to do whatever it’s going to do, but he realizes the sound of the angel’s wings “was strangely familiar” (228).
Chapter 41 Summary
The angels take Weems somewhere warm, and he starts to feel better. The world comes back into focus, and he realizes he’s “in a helicopter” (229).
Weems’s rescuers are from the Tennessee National Guard. One man introduces himself as Sergeant Marten and asks where Weems was coming from. Able to think again, Weems remembers his friends and tells the helicopter crew that his friends remain trapped at the high school. The helicopter turns “heading back the way we’d come” (232). The story ends without the reader learning if the helicopter gets there in time.
Chapters 38-41 Analysis
The helicopter the kids saw in Chapter 23 foreshadows Weems’s rescue in the ending chapters. The earlier sighting told the group help was out there but too far away to find them. By deciding to act and venturing into the storm, Weems gets close enough to the helicopter’s flight pattern for the National Guard to notice him. It’s only when Weems decides to fight against the storm that he finds help.
In Chapter 32, Weems prays to the angel Gabriel because he figures Gabriel is less busy than God. Weems’s hallucinations in Chapters 39-40 harken back to this prayer. Weems interprets the helicopter as an angel—its propellers as wings and its searchlight as the light of heaven. When Weems warms up on board the helicopter, he realizes the helicopter isn’t an angel. It’s never made clear, but the final chapters beg the question of whether angels exist and if Gabriel sent the helicopter to Weems’s location.
The book’s ending shows Weems’s as an unreliable narrator again. It’s not made clear if the helicopter gets to the school before the roof caves in. It’s unclear if the remaining five kids survive at all. As a retrospective narrator, Weems would have known this, but he deliberately keeps this knowledge from the reader to induce suspense. The book ends with Weems saying the helicopter went back the way it had come, but since Weems wasn’t on board, it’s unclear if that direction is toward the school.
