86 pages • 2 hours read
Rodman PhilbrickMax the Mighty
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1998A 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.
Symbols & Motifs
Books
Rachel reads a lot of books. They serve as a security blanket against her terrifying home life. As with all avid readers, for Rachel they’re also a source of happiness. The first one she mentions is the 1908 classic children’s novel The Wind in the Willows, which tells the adventures of Badger, Mole, and Ratty as they try to help Mr. Toad get out of trouble for stealing a motorcar. Author Kenneth Grahame told his young son these stories before publishing them; similarly, Rachel’s father read the book to her before she was able to read it herself. Thus, the book reflects her memories of her father and her desire to somehow return to a time when she was happy.
Each novel in Rachel’s reading list reflects a different aspect of Max and Rachel’s journey. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn relates the story of a boy who, accompanied by a man escaping slavery, runs away from an abusive father. In A Wrinkle in Time, two children travel across space and time in search of their father and to help stop an evil force from taking over everything. The Earthsea Trilogy imagines a world in which magical solutions to difficult problems are possible.
The Sword in the Stone, by T. H. White, author of the Once and Future King trilogy, unfolds the childhood adventures of a commoner who becomes King Arthur. It’s a story about how anyone might become a hero; this means something to Max, who wrestles with the idea that he isn’t some ordinary dope but actually the heroic Max the Mighty.
The Hobbit is about someone who leaves his comfortable, innocent world and ventures into strange and dangerous places, including the deeper realms of his own heart and soul, while on a grand quest. Rachel finds that, like the book’s hero, her destiny involves a mine deep within a mountain.
Most of these books are fantasies that reflect Rachel’s desire to live in a world different from her own, somewhere that doesn’t contain the Undertaker, somewhere she can be happy with people she loves. The journey she takes, though, becomes as adventurous and harrowing as any she reads about. In that sense, she finds herself living those stories in real life.
Rachel’s Helmet
Rachel uses a miner’s helmet, complete with battery-powered headlamp, to read books at night. The helmet makes her feel safe, and it reminds her of her father, who gave her the helmet and used to read to her in the evening. The helmet is Rachel’s connection to someone dear to her whom she misses and wishes could save her from her current peril. When at last she visits her dad’s grave in the mine shaft where he died, Rachel comes to terms with her wish to be saved. She decides she’ll be able to find her way forward without the helmet’s light, and, in a gesture of thanks, returns it to her father by dropping it into the chasm where he lies.
The Prairie Schooner
A brightly painted school bus picks up Max and Rachel as they travel across the country to her father’s home in Montana. Named the Prairie Schooner, the ancient transport is driven by a long-haired, pot-bellied, Hawaiian-shirt-wearing, bespectacled elderly man named the Dippy Hippie. The Schooner’s seats have been removed and replaced with the couches, kitchen, and bunk beds of a home on wheels.
The Schooner is the author’s homage to a similarly painted bus named Furthur that Ken Kesey—author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—drove during his adventures with a motley crew of hippies during the mid-1960s. The purpose of both buses is to see America from a different, more colorful angle than most people do, and it has the desired effect on Max, whose worldview shifts while absorbing Dip’s relaxed, carefree attitude.
The Train
At one point, Max and Rachel escape the police by jumping onto a train. It’s headed west, where they’re going, and they ride it for days in the company of the kindly and helpful Hobo Joe. Aboard it, the kids’ problems melt away, and they can see the world not as a threatening place but as a collection of wonders. The passing landscape affects Max’s mind: “I feel like I’m getting hypnotized. Like I’m wide-awake but dreaming. Like the train is standing still and the world is turning under us” (97). The train becomes a passage into a different world; it takes them from a place of troubles to a future of mystery.
Tunnels
If the kids’ journeys on bus and train open them to other ways of seeing things, the mine shaft at Chivalry takes them deep into the Earth and deeper still into the darkness of their own minds. Trapped in the depths of the mountain, Max and Rachel must confront their deepest fears and come to terms with the things that trouble them the most.
Rachel realizes she can find her way through the darkness of her own life situation without the lighted helmet her dad gave her, and she drops it onto his gravesite so that, symbolically at least, he can have it to find his own way in the afterworld. It’s a stage in her growth as a person that he’d be glad to know about. Max also must confront his fears of darkness and of the monsters of a child’s imagination. He discovers that, despite his worries, he can face danger and behave heroically.
As if they know their work at last is finished, the tunnels finally collapse and complete the gravesite. The two kids return to the light of the outside world and the support and care of good people. If there’s magic in life, as Rachel believes, then one of its evil spells has been broken, and the good magic of love, friendship, and self-acceptance instead finds its place in their lives.
Related Titles
By Rodman Philbrick
