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.
Themes
Achieving Adulthood and Independence
The theme of independence emerges in the earliest pages of the book, when Robie believes that she has achieved independence by spending a few nights in Honolulu alone. She discovers she is not prepared for that kind of independence, only to have herself thrust into a much greater test of adulthood when she tries to escape her quasi-adulthood by getting on a flight home to Midway.
Robie’s inner conflict—her back-and-forth between longing to rest and give up and asserting the need to take care of herself—illustrates the development of this theme. As the days of her adventure go by, she gradually comes to terms with the fact that adulthood—the maturity required to take care of ourselves, and to manage our own affairs—does not arrive when it is convenient. Adulthood comes to Robie, like many others, all of a sudden, and she has to rise to the occasion or perish.
The Brutality of Survival
Bodeen hints at this theme even before the book starts. The epigraph is a quote from George Orwell that states: “To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.”
Robie engages in a lot of inner dialogue about what sort of rules and propriety from her old life are applicable on the raft and on the island. This ranges from the mundane (Should she pee off the raft? Should she take off Max’s shirt?) to the monumental (Should she abandon Max’s body to keep the raft afloat?). This is all a question of Robie metaphorically “dirtying herself.” In the end she does what she has to do to survive, even though most of her actions would not be acceptable in another context.
Robie even does what is necessary on a psychological level by conjuring a phantom apparition of Max to assuage her conscience and to guide her through her isolation. This is something that might raise eyebrows in her regular life, but the extremity of her circumstances makes it a necessity.
Finally, Robie literally dirties herself in pursuit of survival. By the end of the book, she is filthy, and her clothes are tatters. She has eaten a fish she caught with her bare hands, has killed a seal, and has handled the corpse in the survival suit. All of this is unpleasant, but necessary for her to live.
The Fear of Isolation
Although Bodeen is interested in illuminating the artifice of civilization, she also delves into the human need for community by establishing a theme around the fear of isolation. This theme first emerges before Robie even gets on the flight, when she notices her isolation as she goes to get dinner and then finds herself wracked with fear and loneliness through the night after her attack.
In her first moments on the raft with Max, as they watch their aircraft sink beneath the water, Robie says:
I had to cover my ears so I wouldn’t scream myself. I closed my eyes and squeezed my hands tighter over my ears and was alone with the pounding of my heart. Alone with the stinging of my scalp. Alone with the pain in my chest. Alone with the rain on my face. Alone with my freezing wet clothes, clammy dead weight against my skin. My breathing slowed. Alone with the truth. I had almost died (44).
This theme is developed through her relationship with Max. Initially, she is simply desperate for him to wake up and offer her some company, but eventually the longing for companionship takes on a new intensity when she fabricates a phantom Max to keep her company after she abandons his dead body. Robie is so afraid of isolation that she cannot accept the reality of it, and participates in an extended hallucination to provide herself with some relief from that fear.
The Connection between Humans and Animals
This theme is first alluded to when Robie gets her henna tattoo at the beginning of the story, when the tattoo artist tells her about the Hawaiian belief in the connection between people and certain creatures.
The theme is drawn out most completely once Robie is on the raft and the island. On the one hand, she moves towards inhuman/animalistic behavior: killing the seal, sacrificing Max’s body to the ocean, eating the flesh of a raw fish. On the other hand, she starts to see the humanity in many creatures: she grants the mother seal a mercy killing and burial at sea, after describing in great detail the human qualities of her cries and gaze; she names the seal’s daughter; and she identifies with the young albatross that fails to fly away from the island.
Bodeen thus effectively collapses the differences between animal and human and in doing so underscores the central theme of the brutality of survival. Robie, faced with a world where she is reduced to her most fundamental animal self, is then able to rely on the strength of that animal self to get by, even while redeeming that which is animal about her by seeing the humanity in other creatures.
