63 pages • 2 hours read
Paul FleischmanWhirligig
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.
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Beta“Apprentices”-“San Diego, California”Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter Summary: “Apprentices”
Brent takes a bus through Texas to Florida, sitting next to a woman who talks nonstop about various illnesses. At a station in Texas, he is disturbed by a sidewalk preacher’s mention of Cain. Brent arrives in Beale Beach, Florida and falls asleep on the beach. When he wakes up, he is surprised by the warmth of the water of the Gulf Coast.
Brent goes to check into a hotel. Knowing he looks suspicious, he ingratiates himself with the clerk by calling her “ma’am” and asking if there will be a Bible in his room. In his room, Brent hears jazz coming from next door and decides to build his next whirligig in the design of a marching band. He finds a note from the maid wishing him a pleasant stay. He writes back to her, saying, “I’m completely alone” (91).
Brent builds his whirligig on the beach, using a picnic table as a work surface and collecting palm fronds for shade. The whirligig is his most complex yet, but Brent avoids his earlier mistakes and finds himself enjoying the project. He takes a break to swim and read his book about space. He learns that the movement of the sun causes the earth’s seasons, “glorifying in his understanding” (94).
Back in the room he finds a response to his note: “Trisha don’t work today. No one’s alone with Jesus” (95). Brent feels embarrassed and reflects on his family’s approach to religion as a “social rather than a spiritual affair” (95).
Brent eats at a diner, where he makes a mark on the windowsill that records the sun’s position on the horizon.
The next day, a group of children run over to ask Brent questions about his whirligig and he lets them play with his materials. Back at the diner, he is satisfied to see that the sun has moved to the south of his mark on the windowsill. At night, Brent plays his harmonica, watches the stars, and reads Two Years Before the Mast. He continues work for the next two days. On the second day, two of the children return. When Brent secures his finished whirligig to a picnic table, they point out to him that it will be swept away by a hurricane. Brent decides to leave it there anyway, thinking that “after the storm, new whirligigs would appear” (101). He watches one of the little boys blow on a propeller he has made using Brent’s tools.
Chapter Summary: “San Diego, California”
Jenny is home alone with her dying grandmother, an Auschwitz survivor, when she asks Jenny to take her for a drive. Jenny agrees reluctantly. She knows that her grandmother has taken her mother on “scavenger hunts” for nostalgic items before. Her grandmother puts on a wig and “fancy” clothes from the “Eisenhower era,” which, Jenny is saddened to see, are now baggy on her (105).
Jenny’s grandmother directs her through San Diego, asking her to stop at places she associates with certain memories. The first time, she makes Jenny stop short in the middle of a busy street, which causes a lot of honking. Jenny is flustered but decides not to be mad at her grandmother after noticing the “unfocused look” on her face (108). Her grandmother directs her to several stops, including a birch tree that reminds her of Poland, a building where her sister, Rachel, used to live, and an abandoned house where she herself lived.
Jenny, whose middle name is Rachel, reflects that her parents have tried so hard to blend in among their non-Jewish neighbors, even getting a Christmas tree, that they have driven her in the opposite direction, to study Hebrew, Judaism, and the history of the Holocaust.
Her grandmother tells Jenny that she wanted to see these places one last time and asks to go home. When Jenny is upset by her grandmother’s reference to her impending death, her grandmother asks to make one more stop and directs her to the hostel where Brent put up his whirligig. Her grandmother tells her that the whirligig is a symbol that “people are not all Hitler…people are very good also,” and that she visits the whirligig to remind herself of this when bad memories come back to her (114). Jenny and her grandmother hug and sit for a while, watching the whirligig.
“Apprentices”-“San Diego, California” Analysis
Religious references appear throughout “Apprentices,” making Brent reflect on the concepts of guilt, atonement, and his own spirituality. In Texas, he is struck by an unpleasant reminder of his guilt and status as a social outcast by the sidewalk preacher shouting about Cain. The story of Cain, who was cursed to be a “fugitive and a vagabond” after murdering his brother, is an apt biblical metaphor for Brent’s own situation. Though he has been enjoying parts of his solitary journey, Brent is reminded of his guilt-ridden, pariah status here: “Being a stranger in a strange land had suddenly lost its appeal” (88).
Passing through the “Bible Belt,” Brent has further opportunities to reflect on his relationship to Christianity. When he writes to the maid that he is “completely alone” and receives the reply back that “no one’s alone with Jesus,” he feels “slapped” due to the cynical view of religion he has developed as a result of his family’s approach to church (91). Brent’s parents, who choose which church to attend in a similar manner to choosing “what car to buy and be seen in,” approach religion with the same materialistic and status-conscious worldview that Brent has been shedding on his whirligig-building trip (95). Ultimately, despite his encounters with applicable religious themes, Brent does not turn to religion to cope with his loneliness or guilt; instead, he finds social- and self-acceptance through his connections with others.
In this chapter, Brent builds the whirligig that the narrator of “Miami, Florida,” comes across. Brent’s sanguine acceptance that his whirligig may be washed away by a hurricane reflects his view of himself as living a second life; the crash was the symbolic storm that washed away his previous existence.
The earlier revelation in “Miami, Florida” that the whirligig has been moved from its original location on the picnic table reflects the book’s theme of unseen consequences.
Brent’s interaction with the children further reinforces the theme of cause-and-effect. The scene in which the boy blows on the propeller he has made using Brent’s materials refers to Emil’s earlier statement that “A teacher lives forever through his students” (70). The theme of teaching as a legacy appears again in the next chapter, “San Diego, California,” when Jenny’s grandmother shows her the whirligig, saying that she has a permit to teach. Jenny and her grandmother introduce yet another interpretation of the meaning of the whirligig. To them, it represents the good that exists in people, despite the bad. Significantly, Jenny’s grandmother says that Brent is good for giving “happiness to everyone” who passes by the whirligig (114). Her statement represents Brent’s potential for redemption.
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