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 7–9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary
By the time Brady wakes up the next morning, he's become even more of a celebrity; his father shows him an article in a Baltimore paper covering the previous day's events, the bus driver congratulates him, and the school principal announces at an assembly that they "have a bona fide hero in [their] midst" (46).
There are, however, a few jarring notes in the otherwise happy scene. One is J.T. and Digger's determined avoidance of Brady, who assumes his friends are feeling guilty and regretful about their decision not to shout out any kind of warning. The other is the knowledge that Ben is still in critical condition. Though Brady enjoys the attention he's receiving at school, his mind keeps drifting back to the reporter's question, and he decides to talk to J.T. about it. Before he can, however, Brady's mother comes to take him out of school.
Chapter 8 Summary
Brady's mother, looking disheveled and anxious, asks to speak to him outside. Brady guesses that she must have bad news about Ben, but he doesn't anticipate just how bad that news will be: Ben died earlier that morning.In disbelief, Brady asks how that could have happened, and his mother replies that he must have been left in the cold water too long. She also tells Brady not to blame himself because he "did everything [he] could"—a statement Brady privately doubts (50).
Brady's mother takes him home, where he begins to obsess about the missing kayak: "I started thinking that the only thing I wanted to do was go find that red kayak and bring it in. It seemed like a small, insignificant thing. The DiAngelos probably would never want to see it again. But it’s all I could think of doing" (51). Eventually, Brady takes his boat back out to the cove where he'd found Ben.
Brady sits drifting near the dock, not really expecting to find anything: the storm left the watersilty and brown, and in any case, the kayak probably washed downstream. Being out on the river, meanwhile, isn't lifting Brady's spirits the way it normally does. In fact, the surroundings seem menacing; Brady imagines that an eagle screeching overhead is accusing him and remarks that "the roots to a big gum tree, exposed by erosion in the riverbank, suddenly looked like a swarm of snakes slithering into the water" (52). Frustrated and upset, Brady shouts to the river that it "didn't have to kill him!" and breaks down in tears (52). Before leaving the cove, though, he glances down, and sees the red kayak sitting at the bottom of the river.
Chapter 9 Summary
Shaken by his discovery of the kayak, Brady holes up in his bedroom. His father visits him after coming home from work, again praising Brady for his actions and stressing that Ben's death doesn't change their heroism. Brady wants to talk about his feelings of responsibility for the accident, but isn't able to bring himself to broach the topic.He does, however, feel marginally better when he checks his email and finds a message from J.T. saying he's "sorry for what happened" (56).
Brady goes to bed but can't stop thinking about where the DiAngelos are and what they're doing. Unable to fall asleep, he gets up and goes outside to his mom's butterfly garden, which she planted in memory of Amanda. In fact, the garden is one of the only tangible reminders of Brady's sister, because his parents had stored or removed everything else associated with her. Thinking about Amanda—and the guilt his mother felt over her death—makes Brady wonder whether Mrs. DiAngelo will blame herself for what happened to Ben, and he again wishes he had said something.
Brady ultimately gives up trying to fall asleep and asks to go out crabbing with his father in the early morning. Mr. Parks agrees, and Brady begins to feel a bit more hopeful "outside in the brisk air, with a few early songbirds starting up and our eyes getting used to the darkness…like somehow life was going on" (59). Despite the work and the beautiful surroundings, however, Brady still wishes he could find a way to talk to his father about what he's feeling.
They take a break later that morning, and Mr. Parks comments regretfully on how few crabs they've caught compared to past years. Brady continues to stare at the baskets of crabs after his father leaves to take a call, thinking about how "There would be no more second chances [for the crabs]. No more swimming in the beautiful bay or up the Corsica River. They’d be in somebody’s steamer that night" (61). Brady snaps and begins throwing the crabs back in the water.
Chapters 7–9 Analysis
Ben's death strips away any lingering satisfaction Brady might have felt about being a "bona fide hero," and intensifies his feelings of guilt (46). Brady will continue to question the extent of his own responsibility for the rest of the novel, with the red kayak often serving as a symbol for Brady's complicity; significantly, Brady again chooses to say nothing when he spots the kayak at the bottom of the river, despite having gone out for the express purpose of finding it.
Brady himself does not explain why he keeps quiet, but it's clear that seeing the kayak on the river bed unnerves him. The cold is a prominent motif in The Red Kayak; coldness, in its most literal sense, is partially responsible for Ben's death, but it's also popularly associated with feelings of fear and dread. It's therefore striking that Brady describes a "strange, chilly feeling settl[ing] around [him]" just before finding the kayak (53). Perhaps, on some level, Brady is aware not only of what he is about to discover, but also of its significance; earlier in the novel, he had remarked offhandedly about how difficult it was to sink a kayak, so finding this one at the bottom of the river suggests something strange has happened.
Of course, in addition to symbolizing Brady's feelings of guilt, the kayak is also a simple but tangible reminder of Ben's death. Thematically, this ties it to Amanda's clothing, toys, and photos, which Brady's parents have locked away in the attic in an effort to avoid painful memories. Brady, however, isn't entirely happy with the decision, seeing it as an attempt to deny that Amanda ever existed. As the novel unfolds, these different ideas on how to come to terms with the past will conflict more and more.
Last but not least, these chapters give us more insight into Brady's father than we've previously had. As the long stretches of silence on his boat, the Miss Amanda, make clear, Mr. Parks is a loving but not particularly communicative father; his discomfort with sharing his feelings played a role in the temporary breakup of the family after Amanda's death, and prevents Brady from reaching out to him in the present day. Nevertheless, the boat ride the two take in Chapter 9 further underscores the similarities between father and son. Their conversationabout the scarcity of crabs is particularly significant, in that italludes to the ongoing tension between crabbers, whose living depends on fishing the bay, and white-collar scientists and government officials, who are concerned about overfishing). Like Brady, Mr. Parks will ultimately find himself torn between staying loyal to his friends and working-class rootsor doing what he thinks is right.
