Brian Robeson, a child of divorced parents, is going to visit his father up North in Canada. He leaves from New York City, where his mother lives, and sets off for Canada in the small, private plane. While over the middle of nowhere in the Canadian wilderness, the pilot suffers a heart attack, forcing Brian to take control of the plane. He crash lands the plane by a lake surrounded by wilderness, and is injured and jarred from the crash. Stranded and alone in the wilderness, Brian survives in his shelter next to the lake until he is rescued.
Plot
30,000 feet up in the air, Brian’s hired pilot is killed by a heart attack, and is forced to control the plane. As the plane goes down, he searches for a body of water to land in. He can’t find anything until right before the plane hits the ground, crashing through the tops of trees and into the lake. Brian is in serious pain from the crash, constantly floating in and back out of consciousness. The fact that he is really stranded hits …show more content…
The kid was in a point of his life where he was lost, between his parents’ divorce, and his mom’s secret (an affair with another man). Then he gets literally lost in the middle of nowhere in the Canadian wilderness. Brian starts out as hopeless and clueless. He keeps getting crushed by obstacles nature throws at him. However, all the trials only made him wise and strong. By the end, Brian isn’t just surviving, he’s thriving.
Tone
The tone in Hatchet is a roller coaster. Due to the theme of trial and error, there is never one mood for more than thirty pages or so. Once the plane crashes, and at all the other low points, the tone is definitely one of hopelessness. When Brian succeeds, for example when he gets his first bird, there is a sense of triumph and pleasure. When he is finally rescued, there is nothing but relief. Overall, Gary Paulsen set relevant moods that were constantly changing to keep the reader engaged.