47 pages • 1 hour read
S.A. BodeenThe Raft
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 8-13Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 8 Summary
Robie loses her life vest as she falls from the plane: “The falling lasted forever, my arms windmilling in the void. I wanted to stop moving. Stop the noise. Stop the wet. Stop the cold. Stop the blowing. Stop everything” (35). She wants to end the sensations, but at the same time she wants them to continue, because as long as she is miserable, she is alive.
Chapter 9 Summary
Robie hits the surface of the oceanand gets a mouthful of seawater when she screams. She abandons her earlier hope for survival, praying, “God please kill me already. This is more than I can take” (37).
Chapter 10 Summary
Robie sinks down below the surface of the water. She muses, “It was over. I was over. Dying was so much easier than I thought” (39).
Chapter 11 Summary
Chapter 11 begins with a reversal on Robie’s acquiescence to death, saying that, “Something in me wouldn’t accept the easy way out” (42). Her survival instinct has kicked in, and she fights her way all to the surface of the ocean, hoping to make it, only to be blocked by debris on the water: she is just below the surface, but she cannot get air.
Chapter 12 Summary
Robie feels a sharp pain in her head; it’s Max, dragging her from the water by her hair and pulling her onto the raft. The first thing she sees above the water is Max holding up a bright red flare. Robie vomits seawater. She tries to breathe but is inhibited by the pain of pulling air into her waterlogged lungs.
Max calls out to Larry, illuminating the water with his flare. By the flare’s light, he and Robie watch the wreck of the G-1 slip slowly under the surface of the water.
Chapter 13 Summary
Robie, still unable to fully wrap her head around the situation, accuses Max of hurling her out of the plane: “Still not looking at [Robie], [Max] said, just loud enough so [she] could hear, ‘Would you rather still be on it?’” (45). Robie ends the chapter by facing the thought that Max might have preferred Larry to survive over her.
Chapters 8-13 Analysis
In this section immediately following the crash, Bodeen choses to use extremely short chapters—some merely a few lines long—to convey the fragmented nature of Robie’s experience. Robie is struggling to understand the true nature of her circumstances, and her mind is in shock. This is captured by the choppy chapter breaks and short bursts of sentences.
While Robie is underwater, the writing focuses mostly on her thoughts, and there is little sensory detail. Gradually, as Robie fights off her denial and her initial deathwish, sensory details start to return to the writing, as Bodeen highlights the red light of the flare, the pain in Robie’s lungs, the driving rain, and Robie’s soaked clothes. This tracks Robie’s slow process of coming out of shock.
This section also builds on the early characterization of Max as a person who can handle himself in dire circumstances. He saves Robie’s life, inflates the raft, and even lights a flare to guide Larry from the wreckage. The only thing he cannot do is save Larry’s life.
