90 pages • 3 hours read
Priscilla CummingsRed Kayak
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2004A 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 4–6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary
Brady reaches the dock and readies his skiff, reluctantly allowing Tilly to jump into the boat after him. Following his father's advice, he sets off to explore some of the creeks that branch off from the main river.
Brady's skiff quickly falls behind his father's faster workboat, the Miss Amanda. Seeing the boat—named in honor of the Parks' younger child—plunges Brady back into the past. His sister Amanda died suddenly in infancy, and the shock and sorrow of the event nearly tore the family apart; Brady's mother spent half a year living with her family in Connecticut, and his father—frequently called to work weekends—ended up placing Brady in Carl's care for days at a time.
For Brady, though, the experience of staying with his cousin had unexpected benefits. Carl was training at an Annapolis firehouse at the time, and the firefighters and paramedics there largely treated Brady like one of their own: "They gave me my own locker, and just like them, I taped up snapshots of my family inside the metal door" (24). Sometimes, Carl and his coworkers even allowed Brady to ride along in the ambulance.
Brady continues to search the tributaries but is quickly growing frustrated; he doesn't see how the kayak could have drifted out of the main current, and the weather has him worried about Ben. He remembers falling through a frozen pond as a young boy and remarks that he "know[s] what being really cold is like" (26). Eventually, he decides to call his mother to find out if she knows anything; she tells him that Mrs. DiAngelo was rescued downriver, but that Ben is still missing. Brady hangs up and is about to turn back when he notices Tilly barking at something in a small cove. Noting that it's "hard to ignore Tilly's instincts," Brady steers the skiff into the cove, where he finds Ben floating near a dock (27).
Chapter 5 Summary
Ben's life jacket is hooked over some old piling, but Brady is able to disentangle him and pull him into the skiff. He does his best to warm Ben up, removing some of his wet clothes and giving him his own jacket and hat. Panicking, Brady tries to phone for help, but fumbles and ends up dropping his cell phone in the water.
Fortunately, Brady remembers some of the emergency training he picked up on while he was living with Carl and begins to check Ben's "ABCs"—airway, breathing, and circulation. Determining that Ben isn't breathing and has no pulse, Brady begins to administer CPR. In between breathing and doing chest compressions, Brady manages to get the skiff running again and angle its course back toward the main river.
Eventually, Brady reaches the landing, where several emergency vehicles have assembled. Carl and his coworkers take over CPR on Ben and prepare to take him to the hospital; just before they leave, however, Brady hears them say that Ben has a pulse. Brady gives a statement to a policeman and returns to his skiff, overjoyed because he thinks Ben will be alright. Nevertheless, he is rattled by the experience and pauses on his way home to pray and reflect on how the day's events have changed him: "I knew then I would never be the same person anymore. Because that day on the Corsica River, the day I lifted Ben off the piling, I had straddled the invisible line between life and death that runs down all our lives every second—with every breath we take. And thanks to some good luck and timing—thanks to Tilly, and God, too—I had pulled Benjamin DiAngelo from one side to the other" (35).
Chapter 6 Summary
Brady returns home, where he cleans up and dries off. His parents praise him for his actions, and the three sit around the kitchen table having lunch and discussing where and how Brady managed to find Ben. A phone call interrupts the talk: it's Carl, with an update.Ben is being transported to a hospital in Washington D.C., but Mrs. DiAngelo is doing well enough to give a formal statement. She says she took Ben out in the kayak because he wanted a ride before the family left town, but somehow the boat became flooded with water.Before being swept away herself, she managed to steer the kayak close enough to shore to hook Ben's life jacket on the piling.
Carl wraps up the call by praising Brady's heroism and suggesting that he take the next day off from school. More phone calls and congratulations follow, including one with a journalist. Brady recounts what happened with one notable exception: "I didn’t include how we’d seen the red kayak that morning, and how we didn’t bother to call out a warning" (41).
Before the interview ends, the reporter asks Brady whether he's worried that Ben will have sustained brain damage from being out in the cold water. The possibility leaves Brady feeling shaken, and he thinks about the patients he's seen at the nursing home where his mother works. One of them has brain damage and is confined to a wheelchair, and Brady is horrified by the idea of Ben ending up in a similar state: "Man, I just couldn’t stand to see Ben like that. All twisted in a wheelchair. I reached over for a pillow, doubled it up, and hit it hard with my fist. I’d rather be dead, I thought, than brain damaged" (43).
Chapters 4–6 Analysis
The Red Kayak is, among other things, a coming-of-age story, and these three chapters mark the beginning of Brady's transition to adulthood. Though Brady is in many ways quite mature for his age, he is still naïve enough to see the search on the river as—at least in part—an adventure, admitting to feeling "panicked" but also "excited" as he sets off (23).The accident changes this, however, even before Brady hears of Ben's death. Brady learns firsthand what it is like to hold another person's life in his hands, and he walks away from this sobering experience feeling like a different person.
Perhaps because of this, Brady shows some signs of discomfort as people begin to praise him for his actions; he turns down Carl's offer to "flash [the ambulance] lights" in Brady's honor the next day, and simply "shrug[s]" when his mother asks whether he's willing to let a reporter interview him (40, 41). In fact, Chapter 6begins with Brady protesting that he "didn't set out to be a hero" (36). The complex nature of morality will be a recurring theme in The Red Kayak, and it's clear that in these chapters, Brady is starting to grapple with just how complicated it can be.Presumably, boththe lingering possibility that Ben will suffer permanent harm, as well as hisearlier decision to stay silent are complicating how Brady feels about pulling Ben from the water; what looks like straightforward "heroism" is actually not so straightforward after all.
The centrality of the Corsica River in these chapters further underscores this moral ambiguity. The Corsica's role in The Red Kayak is multilayered, combining elements of symbolism, motif, and setting. Above all, however, it is a metaphor for the deceptiveness of appearances and the presence of submerged truths; in the novel's first chapter, Brady describes how the river's "smooth as glass" surface hides "currents [that] run so hard and so fast" (5). On the day of the accident, visibility on the river is particularly bad, and "everything seem[s] gray"—a description that parallels Brady's own confusion about his role in the kayak's sinking (22).
In addition to introducing new themes, Chapters 4 through 6 also continue to explore questions related to memory and the past. Both are important not only in terms not only of plot, but also in terms of narrative structure; Brady frequently interrupts his narrative—already a flashback itself—to discuss recollections he had at the time. Through these insertions, we find out more about the way Brady's personal history has shaped his character. In the aftermath of his younger sister's death, for instance, Brady spent a large amount of time living at a fire station with Carl, where he took on adult responsibilities like cooking and cleaning. Cummings also uses these flashbacks to establishconnections between events that are spaced out in time—for example, the "emergency stuff" Brady observed while staying with Carland the CPR he later uses to resuscitate Ben (25). In establishing this link between the two events, Cummings not only encourages us tosee echoes of Amanda in Ben, but also think about the good that can arise from terrible tragedy.
