87 pages • 2 hours read
Chris CrutcherWhale Talk
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2001A 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.
Chapters 1-3 Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
In this introductory chapter, the reader learns about the narrator, The Dao (T.J.) Jones, a child of African-American, Japanese, and white descent who was adopted by John Paul and Abby Jones. Glenda, T.J.’s white,biological mother,and the Jones first meet in a hospital where Abby was recovering from her fourth miscarriage and Glenda was giving birth to her son.Stephen, Glenda’s partner, abandoned Glenda and the baby when T.J.’s darker skin color made it clear that he couldn’t be Stephen’s son. Glenda gave T.J. to the Jones family and eventually walked out his life.
T.J. describes growing up in the racially-homogenous, white-dominated town of Cutter, which is fifty miles outside of Spokane, Washington. While he rarely encounters explicit racism, he frequently encounters more subtle racism. T.J.’s response to this racism is usually “loud” (4), a point illustrated by his call-in to a radio station to complain about their decision to hire a racist cop as a host.T.J.finds his life is further complicated by his unusual name. T.J. illustrates the social cost of having his name by recounting a fight he got into as a child after being teased about the name.Beyond his name, he also must deal with the social predominance of athletes at his high school, Cutter High.
Looking back over the events of his last year of high school, T.J. speculates that the chain of events recounted in the novel all started on the second day of his senior year when John Simet, his English teacher, recruited him as a swimmer for a new team. Simet was approached by Mr. Morgan, the school principal, to take over for a retired wrestling coach, but proposed swimming as an alternative.
During his meeting, Simet half-jokingly threatens T.J. with bad grades in English if he does not participateand gives T.J. twelve hours to think it over. T.J. has always avoided varsity athletics despite pressure to participate due tohis athleticism. He does so because he hates being told what to do and does not like the way athletes are given preferential treatment at Cutter High.
He ultimately decides to swim for Simet after encountering Mike Barbour, a football player and a bully, threatening Chris Coughlin, a student who is developmentally challenged and is the little brother of a former star athlete who died. Mike threatens Chris because Chris is wearing his dead brother’s athletic letter jacket. Chris’s deficits are the result of one of his mother’s boyfriends nearly suffocating Chris with clear wrap. T.J. defends Chris from Mike, who is angry because he believes only athletes who earned the letter should wear letter jackets. After confronting Barbour, whose hostility is also laced with racism, T.J. reassures Chris that he can wear the jacket, but he later sees Chris discard the jacket, which T.J. rescues.
T.J. visits All Night Fitness, a local gym, to get permission to train in the gym’s undersized pool during off hours. He sees Chris helping a girl with some disabilities swim in the pool. When T.J. greets Chris, Chris recoils in shame. Seeing Chris swim makes T. J. realize that nothing would irritate Mike Barbour more than seeing Chris wear a jacket he earned. He decides to join the swim team at that moment.
Chapter 2 Summary
T.J. opens the chapter by reflecting on a lesson his father taught him after watching an interview with dying tennis legend Arthur Ashe, namely that “the universe doesn’t create a special dispensation” just because a person is a talented athlete; people should instead “take what the universe gives,” since “in the end we all go out the same way” (27).The day after his conversation with Simet, T.J. tells Simet he will be on the swim team, but he will need a team around him. In talking with Simet, T.J. finds out that each coach sets the standards for receiving a letter jacket.
On the next weekend, T.J. makes recruitment packets for the team and dubs the team “The Mermen.” TJ places the packets in envelopes, which he then puts on the windshields of cars along the river. That night, Dan Hole, a verbose student that T.J. remembers from an English class, calls to express his interest and promises to get back to T.J. about his decision. A second call comes from Tay-Roy Kibble, a steroid-free bodybuilder and talented musician with great lung capacity. Tay-Roy is tired of the time and expense of steroid-free bodybuilding, so he agrees to join the team.
The next day at lunch, Mike Barbourridicules Chris by calling him a dummy while T.J. sits with him. T.J. verbally and physically confronts Mike, and their shoving match is broken up by Coach Benson, head football coach and advisor to the Lettermen’s Club. Mike tells Coach Benson that he was talking to Chris and T.J. about how important it is that only athletes who have earned their letters wear the letter jackets. T.J.’s profane, angry response bothers Benson, a stickler for polite language. After sending Chris ahead to swim, T.J. explains in more polite language that there is something wrong with an athlete like Mike Barbour, who has everything going on him, picking on Chris, who is “brain-damaged” and misses his deceased brother (39).
Benson tells T.J. that the Letterman’s Club and the school Athletic Council have recently established a policy that permits only athletes who have earned the letters through their excellence to wear the jackets. T.J. responds by asking what right these bodies have to set school-wide policy, to which Benson responds by pointing out that athletics are an important part of the school and town’s reputation. He also criticizes T.J. for failing to show school spirit by participating in athletics. T.J. reminds Benson that Chris was wearing the jacket off school grounds and then leaves, disappointed in what he has learned during the conversation.
Chris runs into T.J. in the journalism room as he attempts to outsmart the school software, so he can see pictures of breasts. T.J. talks to Chris about his brother’s letter jacket. He convinces Chris that because his brother was bigger than Chris, the letter jacket probably isn’t the right size for him. Instead, T.J. says, he will give him a Speedo jacket that does fit so that everyone will know he is a “stud swimmer” (44).
Chapter 3 Summary
T.J. introduces the character Rich Marshall at the start of Chapter Three. Marshall is a member of Wolverines Too, an athletic booster club that is supposed to provide support and raise funds for all athletics at Cutter High but only focuses on football. Richgraduated a year before T.J. He represents for T.J. what is wrong with athletics at his school. Rich runs his family’s logging company, which he took over after the death of his father, and (like Mike) has racist ideas about nonwhites.
T.J. has an ongoing conflict with Rich that began during T.J.’s freshman year. T.J. was hanging out in the parking lot of a gas station when Rich and some friends arrived. Rich asked someone to go to a sports store to get a hunting tag for him: he had shot a deer and now wanted to shoot the deer’s fawn as well without getting into trouble for killing it. He wanted to stuff it and put it in his yard. With the tag, he could claim that he only realized after shooting the fawn that it was too small to be hunted.
T.J. listened in on the conversation until he could figure out where the fawn was and then told Rich he wasn’t going to help him kill a baby deer. This made Rich angry, but someone else volunteered to get the tag. Rich and his friends headed out to get the tag. Meanwhile, T.J. rode his mountain bike out into the woods until he found the fawn standing over its mother. Despite his best attempts, T.J. couldn’t drive the fawn away from the body of its mother. When Rich and his friends arrived, T.J. threw himself over the fawn, assuming that Rich wouldn’t shoot if he was in the way.
Rich’s friends attempted to move T.J., and the deer even kicked him in the forehead. In all the chaos, Rich managed to shoot the deer, which died while still in T.J.’s arms. Rich and his three friends then beat T.J., who was bloodied as a result. After they left with the animals, T.J. was rescued by Mr. Simet, who happened to be driving by. He took T.J. to his home to get cleaned up and listened as T.J. ranted about Rich and his hatred of people who hunted when they didn’t need the meat. Mr. Simet took him home.
That next week, T.J. wore his bloodied clothes for five days straight and told everyone what happened. Mr. Morgan, the principal, tried to force T.J. to stop wearing the clothes because they were “‘disruptive attire’”(53), but his parents, who came of age during the 1960s, pushed back by pointing out that Rich was out of control, that T.J. had every right to wear the clothes as an expression of free speech, and that the school could expect legal action if anything else happened with Rich, or if T.J. was suspended.
T.J. shifts back to the present when he thinks about the similarities between him and Chris, who is skinny, pale, and has vacant eyes. T.J.’s own life started out on a path that could have led him in the same direction. His biological motheroften had strange men around or left him alone for days in his crib or a car seat with no food and unchanged diapers, but T.J. never suffered beatings or sexual abuse. It would have taken only one bad man to have changed T.J.’s fate.
Because of this history, T.J. feels a connection to Chris and anyone who is abused or the underdog. T.J. feels that connection deep in his body. The outsized importance of sports at Cutter High and the way it is used to diminish non-athletes are parts of why T.J. wants to assemble the Mermen. T.J. tells himself that he had “better be a little careful, or this could get too important” (58).
As his recruiting drive continues, T.J. starts training by himself at All Night Fitness and learns to pace himself. He is startled at the gym at 2:30 in the morning one day when he comes across Oliver Van Zandt secretly sleeping in the sauna. Oliver sleeps in the club between shifts at Wendy’s and Burger King. He gave up his house so he could afford tuition for his son, a student at the University of Washington. Oliver’s commitment to his son and his willingness to live in the gym help T.J. get some perspective about his goals for the team.
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
The initial chapters introduce two important themes:the issue of violence,and the place of athletics in high school.
Violence appears in both intimate and public spaces. The reader is immediately confronted with intimate violence with the story of T.J.’s childhood, and the character of Chris. The violence T.J. experienced was neglect at the hands of his mother, who left her toddler alone because she was consumed with her use of drugs. While T.J.’s insecurity and sympathy for underdogs are the only apparent impacts of that violence, Chris’s brain damage shows that sometimes it is impossible to overcome the aftermath of violence.
While one would assume that violence in public spaces would be a more infrequent occurrence because of societal pressure, T.J.’s story of the deer and his recounting of the bullying Chris suffers make it clear that violence is allowed to thrive because adults and institutions do nothing to prevent it. Hunting is a more naturalized form of violence that is moderated by laws such as the one that should have prevented Rich from killing the fawn. By securing a tag, Rich is able to circumvent the law; there are no checks to prevent his abuse of the law, however. T.J.’s attempt to protect the fawn from violence and to protest its death afterward is short-circuited because Rich is armed and the people who attack T.J. are physically stronger. Might, in this case, seemingly makes right, and there are few consequences for this violence. T.J.’s loud and dramatic protest of this violence is ultimately ineffective because Rich is not held accountable for his killing of the deer.
One source of violence the characters confront is inequality, which is made most apparent in these early chapters in terms of the different treatment that athletes and non-athletes receive at Cutter High. Chris is a target not only because of his developmental disability, which already differentiates him from his peers, but also because he wears his brother’s letter jacket, a symbol of athletes’ privilege in the social milieu of the school. While the letter jacket is clearly a symbol of his close connection with his brother, from the perspective of the athletes, the letter is a symbol of the place of athletes in the pecking order of the school.
Far from enforcing equal treatment of all, the responsible adults in the school, including Coach Benson and Principal Morgan, create an atmosphere in which athletes are protected and given preferential treatment because of their belief in the importance of authority and supporting the status quo. As T.J.’s experiences illustrate, racial identity is also another characteristic onto which bullies latch when selecting their victims.
Crutcher’s introduction of these themes in the initial chapters of the novel sets up the central conflict that drives the plot of the novel:T.J.’s effort to destroy preferences for athletes, and the athletes’ efforts to maintain that privilege at all costs.
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