81 pages • 2 hours read
Gary PaulsenWoods Runner
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2010A 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.
Themes
The End of Childhood and Transition to Adulthood
In many ways, Woods Runner is a classic bildungsroman: a story that depicts a person’s coming-of-age, or transition from childhood into adulthood. The novel opens by specifically describing Samuel as “a child of the forest” (3) and noting his age as 13. Though the majority of the narrative takes place over the course of a relatively short time period, Samuel’s shift from the innocence of childhood to the maturity and responsibility of adulthood is more or less complete at the end of their journey.
Samuel’s innocence is first marked in the novel’s discussion of the mysterious (to Samuel) land to their East: civilization. His idealized and romantic idea of the big cities in the US and Europe is one of the things he must overcome on his journey to manhood (9). His musings on this different lifestyle are almost immediately complicated by news of the War for Independence reaching their small settlement. The war reaches them far too soon, and Samuel is thrust into the role of savior and protector. The novel further explains that Samuel, though only 13, “lived on a frontier where even when things were normal, someone his age was thirteen going on thirty. Childhood ended when it was possible to help with chores; for a healthy boy or girl, it ended at nine, possibly ten” (34).
This is marked by Samuel’s proficiency with hunting and tracking; he provides fresh meat for most of the people in the village. This proficiency is identified as a marker of maturity, especially when compared to Samuel’s parents, who are described as “almost child-like” in their “lack of physical skills, their joy in gentleness, their love of books and music” and their “wonder in knowing all they could about the whole wide world, but not necessarily the world right around them” (34). In contrast to this, Samuel has already “become the provider for his family” (34) when the novel begins.
Coming-of-age is about more than the type of labor that one performs, however, and we can see that the Samuel at the novel’s opening is in a liminal space—he is in the process of becoming a man, but he has not left childhood behind. The things he sees and is forced to do on his quest to find his parents is what shifts Samuel over the line into adulthood. One of the most significant of these events is when Samuel kills a man for the first time: “Without thinking, his rifle at his hip, he touched the hair trigger and, in slow motion, felt the rifle buck, saw the small hole appear in the Indian’s chest” (53). It is after this that he’s picked up and nursed back to health by Coop’s people. Leaving the safety of the armed group behind to set out alone to search for his parents at a faster pace is another of the decisions Samuel makes that moves him towards adulthood.
Another important step is Samuel’s experience with the Clarks. Though he must stand by and watch the parents be slaughtered, his instinct is not to flee the area to save himself but to find and provide care for Annie. Annie’s introduction to the story highlights the difference between leaving childhood and entering adulthood. As Samuel explained earlier, Annie, aged eight or nine, is at exactly the right age where a child is supposed to begin taking on the responsibilities of adulthood. Samuel is only four years older, yet his recent experiences have transformed him into the adult to whom Annie clings for safety and security.
By the time they rescue Samuel’s mother and father, his knowledge of the woods and experience with the Redcoats and Hessians puts him into a position of authority over his own parents. When he meets his mother and she urges him to “please, please be careful,” Samuel’s wry thought that “telling him to be careful now, after all that had happened—that horse was well and truly gone from the barn” (130) is an indication that Samuel recognizes the way the parent/child relationship has already irrevocably changed for him.
Abner, too, acknowledges this difference when he gives Samuel instructions for evading the redcoats. He says, “They’re going to try to be your ma and pa, but for now, you have to be the leader. They don’t have the knowledge for what’s coming. You do” (144). His parents, too, come to realize this on the march; after Samuel tells them about his journey, his father reacts with surprise: “‘But how could you…,’ his father started. ‘You’re thirteen!’” (147). His mother, too, tells him, “You’re so different. Grown” (149). When Samuel protests, saying, “No. I’m the same. It’s everything else that’s changed” (149), his mother pushes back:
No. You’ve changed. Not in a bad way. You…know things. See differently. Think differently. If I didn’t know you, I don’t think I would recognize you. It’s like you’ve gone to some far place and come back a different person. But I love the new Samuel as much as I loved the old. And I’m very glad, I’m so thankful, that you’re with us, to show us, to lead us (149).
Samuel’s transition is explicitly recognized in the Epilogue, too, when Samuel insists on joining a rebel group. His mother is on his side, saying “No […] He’s right. He may be only sixteen, but age doesn’t matter now. He’s his own man and if he feels that strong, he must do it” (159). Over the course of his journey, Samuel left behind the innocence and dependence of childhood and instead donned the mangle of adulthood. His knowledge of the woods, of warfare, and of the nature of men and death propelled him out of the lingering vestiges of childhood, through the liminal space between, and firmly into an adulthood that saw him making hard decisions and taking responsibility for his family. Throughout the novel, Samuel faces hardship and makes noble, courageous decisions that forge him into a man who embraces duty and service to others.
Civilization Versus Wilderness
Paulsen sets up a striking comparison between civilization (the cities of the East) and wilderness (the woods Samuel grows to know so well). This dichotomy is established early in the narrative both through descriptions of the woods and through Samuel’s imagining of the big cities of the world. Despite Samuel’s skill and comfort in the woods, he believes that he does not “belong” in them: “It was a world that did not care about man any more than it cared about dirt, or grass, or leaves” (4). Samuel claims a lack of belonging but not a lack of knowledge, and he compares his understanding of the woods to his parents’ fuller ignorance, noting, “They loved the woods, but they did not understand them, not like Samuel” (7). This early consideration of the family’s relationship with the woods grounds the contrast that will be explored for the rest of the novel: “They had told their son that they didn’t belong in towns, either. They weren’t comfortable in the world of roads, houses, and villages. East of the imaginary line in the cabin was what his father and mother called civilization” (7). In this way, the settlement is imagined in a type of liminal space between wilderness/civilization that echoes Samuel’s position between childhood/adulthood.
Samuel describes the woods as a place of sense, noting that “there wasn’t noise in the forest” (7), but that there were smells that would linger on you, “smoke and blood and grease and something green” (6). It is in the woods that Samuel contemplates the society he knows of only from books and stories, the “polished shoes and ornate clothes and formal manners and enormous wealth […] cultured men who wore carefully powdered wigs and dipped snuff out of the little silver snuffboxes and beautiful women dressed in gowns of silk and satin with swirling petticoats […] ” (113). The news of the war has complicated this vision for Samuel, however, and he struggles to understand:
The World. It was supposed to be a better place than the frontier, with a more sensible way to live. And yet he had just learned an ugly truth about that world only the evening before. Those people in the world who were supposed to be civilized, full of knowledge and wisdom and graciousness and wealth and education, were caught in the madness of a vicious, bloody war (11).
This war, which seems so distant to Samuel, is also mind-boggling. He’s seen violence on the frontier, “But nothing like this, nothing that challenged the established order, the very rule of the Crown, the civilized life that came from the English way of living” (16). As the novel and Samuel’s journey progress, he comes to recognize that there is a breed of violence that is inherent in the maintenance of “the established order” and “the civilized life.” This violence is described in Paulsen’s informational interludes between chapters. He notes, for example, the organization and armament of the British soldiers, highlighting the invention of “grapeshot,” which turned rifles into “something like a giant shotgun” and “was so viciously effective against columns of marching men that its destruction would not be duplicated until the use of the rapid-fire machine gun” (26). Paulsen also describes a technique called “the Wall of British Steel” (52), which caused incredible casualties in opposing forces. These military movements, organized to cause as much death as possible, are the hand by which “civilization” is maintained.
When Samuel finally encounters real “civilization” in the form of New York, he is overwhelmed by even the glimpses of its size: “Now and then, through the mist, he could make out what seemed to be a large city. Large? Huge” (122). When the fog clears, he saw that “the city was huge, with buildings standing three and four stories high, and houses spread out in a grid” (123). His skills at hunting and tracking become useless in the city. He wonders, “How could they hope to find anybody in all those buildings? Looking at the city, imagining how many people must be there, made the rest of the trip seem almost easy. The woods, the forest, was nothing compared to this” (124).
After Samuel moves his family to safety, he stays in Philadelphia and joins a rebel group that continues to push back against the British. In the closing lines of the novel, Samuel retreats to the same clearing he’d found the day his parents were taken. The war would continue, and more people would die in the name of civilization, but Samuel finds comfort in the wild lands of his childhood: “But for Samuel, [the war] would come to a close in the soft beauty of the forest. The peace, for him, would hold” (161).
Paulsen’s juxtaposition and contrast between the calm of the wilderness and the intense violence of civilization makes a strong statement about what we hold as dangerous and what we hold as safe. Though few are as comfortable in the woods as Samuel is, through his eyes we can see how the wilderness is, in many ways, a place of refuge from the political maneuverings of man.
The Difference Between Justified and Gratuitous Violence
The use of violence in Woods Runner provides the reader with an interesting comparison between what is justified and what is gratuitous. This discussion begins before Samuel begins to feel the effects of the war, and it is carried through into a large-scale look at military movements and treatment of prisoners. In the first chapter, Samuel muses on the killing of deer; specifically, he waits too long to pull the trigger of his rifle and the deer he’d been sighting escapes. He doesn’t mind this, however, despite explaining that “he’d killed plenty of deer, sometimes ten or fifteen a day, so many they could not possibly eat all the meat. He often shot them because the deer raided the cornfields and had to be killed to save the crops” (11). This distinction makes it clear that Samuel does not kill lightly or thoughtlessly, but rather in a measured way that preserves the stability of life on the frontier.
The difference between this type of death and the type he begins to encounter on his journey is made clear when he finds the abandoned bodies of the settlers after the attack; among the other corpses, he finds the bodies of three children who had been slaughtered. Samuel weeps as he buries them—the smallest with the crude doll that had been thrown aside—and the reader is invited to spend this time wondering how the death of three children could have been justified. As Samuel follows his stolen family, he comes across many more scenes of death and destruction left behind by the British and their allies. As Samuel’s settlement had earlier been baffled by the stories of people fighting the British, the reader can infer that this campaign is not motivated by any actual resistance from the frontier people, but rather by some other desire of the redcoats to exhibit their force.
Samuel kills two men over the course of the novel. The first is an Iroquois whom he shoots as the man and his partner run towards him to attack. Despite the clear self-defense justification of this act, Samuel remains affected by it; when Coop tells him of the marksmanship of the men, Samuel protests, “I’m not sure about killing” and demurs the intention, saying, “I wasn’t aiming. He shot and I pulled the trigger” (70). He kills again when the family is moving towards Philadelphia, pulling his trigger as the British officer swings his bayonet. After, Samuel is disturbed: “[He] tried not to look at the officer he had killed. As with the Indian, it had happened by reflex. So quick. And final. The death bothered him, but when he thought of that saber coming down at him, he knew there had been no choice” (156).
Compare this to the way the Hessians kill in the novel. An informational passage explains that the Hessians:
brought with them such savage, atrocious behavior, and committed war crimes so far outside civilized behavior—bayoneting unarmed captive soldiers who had surrendered, farmers, women (including pregnant women), children and even infants—that they became known as little more than beasts and were treated in kind (73).
The reader sees them in action when they attack the Clark farm. Annie’s mother and father are “immediately gunned down. Then four soldiers jumped on the porch and bayoneted them” (83). When Annie, a girl of only eight or nine, runs out of the house, the soldiers shoot at her as she flees. Then, the Hessians loot the house, “taking anything shiny and all the food they could find” before burning it (83). Samuel cries and grieves, trying to process how the warmth of “eating together, how open and gentle and pleasant and good it had been to sit with them and talk” was now “Destroyed. Gone. Gone in this ugly war with these evil men” (84). Later, as they move towards New York, Samuel sees more smoldering proof of this madness: “Some had been attacked and burned—probably by the Hessians—but many had not. It made no sense, nor did it follow any logic—like so much that had happened” (113).
The novel shows us many different kinds of violence, but it makes a clear distinction between violence that is necessary or productive and violence that is arbitrary and gratuitous. This pairs strongly with the theme of civilization versus wilderness, as Samuel’s experience with death and violence has previously come from the interactions of nature, where animals kill for food or self-defense and not for personal gain. Samuel is deeply affected by the death that he sees—and causes—because its origins lie not in necessity or survival but in greed and personal gain.
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