Theme Of Survival In Gary Paulsen's Hatchet

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Recommended: Theme of Hatchet by Gary Paulsen

If you were stranded in the wilderness could you survive? Many people would like to believe that they could. The question is could they really do it? In the story Hatchet by Gary Paulsen the main character Brian is put to this exact test. A series of unfortunate incidents end with Brian’s plane crashing and him being stuck alone in the wilderness. The theme of the novel is when faced with a survival situation it takes both physical and mental strength to survive. Paulsen illustrates this theme through fire, hunting, and injuries.
When Brian first crashes in the wilderness he lays around feeling sorry for himself. Quickly he realizes that he has many issues to attend to if he is going to survive until someone finds him. Even after he realizes his needs though he continues to mope around until he falls asleep one night. He has a dream about one of his friends and his father. At first the dream makes no sense to him, but after a while he realizes in the dream they were showing him how to make fire. Brian struggles with making a fire, only slowly realizing all the things he needs to do to get one started. He finally does get a fire started, which is his first big triumph over nature. Paulsen has Brian learn about fire through a dream to put an obvious emphasis on mental strength. Dreams are one hundred percent mental and therefor a …show more content…

He has to find food for himself. He starts out with foraging until he recognizes a need for meat. That is when he decides it is time to hunt. He begins with fish which takes him a while to catch. Eventually though he masters that and moves on to hunting birds. Once again it is quite a struggle for him to figure out but he gets it. Brian’s struggles in hunting represent one of Paulsen’s biggest theme points. Hunting requires both physical and mental strength from Brian. He has to begin with mental strength to learn how to catch prey. Then it takes physical prowess to carry out the

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