45 pages • 1 hour read
Gary PaulsenGuts: The True Stories Behind Hatchet and the Brian Books
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Middle Grade | 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.
Themes
The Value of Inherited and Invented Knowledge
Content Warning: Guts includes detailed portrayals of survival situations, including human fear, danger, injury, and death. The book includes graphic descriptions of hunting, trapping, fishing, and killing wild animals, as well as processing the bodies for food and tools.
At the heart of Guts is a thematic thread that weaves and binds the collection of anecdotes and stories into a cohesive collection: Survival is nature’s imperative, and man assures his survival in the wilderness through the acquisition of knowledge. However, Guts also suggests that man has lost the formerly hard-won, inherited information: “we have gone away from knowledge, away from knowing what something is really like” (Guts: 52). Humanity exists separate from nature and must “invent” survival again when he enters the wild, though he is now disadvantaged. Innate survival skills, once inherited and understood from generation to generation, have been lost due to advances in modern civilization. Paulsen values these forgotten skills and prioritizes humanity’s reconnection with a sense of survival and self-preservation.
Paulsen’s wilderness stories and vignettes are backward facing, reviewing the past for guidance: “Brian lived as they did in prehistoric times, and as I have done on occasion,” Paulsen writes (Guts: 137). He ventures into the forest to find a connection to nature and to the past. Even as a child, Paulsen looked back, rather than forward, for knowledge. He was fascinated by the river that came near town, writing: “where it came from—that was all that mattered. Somewhere north, somewhere in the woods, somewhere wild—that’s all I cared about, all I wanted to see, to know” (Guts: 71).
For Paulsen, this knowledge is important for survival in a physical sense but also in an emotional sense. Guts suggests that old wisdom provides insight as well as joy and harmony with nature. This is a vital aspect in finding true happiness, both for the character of Brian and for Paulsen himself. In the moment Paulsen is inspired to write Hatchet, he feels a connection to the past that empowers him to think about how survival knowledge might endure in the form of storytelling. He sits by a fire and the spark of inspiration strikes: “It was a grand feast, a feast that made me think of ancient people […] before there was recorded history, when they sat this way by old fires, cutting meat with stone tools, looking up at the stars and letting the food and fire fill them with life” (Guts: 147). This momentary connection to the past, to the permanence of nature and to the power of story, creates the idea of Brian, an unskilled, unprepared boy who must learn to survive, as Paulsen himself had done.
Paulsen values and understands his place in a long line of people who struggled and fought for survival, but in the absence of inherited or innate knowledge, both Brian and Paulsen needed to discover survival methods long lost to most of humanity. When it came time to write Hatchet, Paulsen created a boy who, like himself, had to “invent” survival anew. The skills that were once passed down from prior generations had been lost, and Brian was forced to rely on himself and his curiosity and creativity to find ways to live in the woods. “Maybe that was how it really happened, way back when—some primitive man tried to spear fish and it didn’t work and he ‘invented’ the bow and arrow,” Brian thinks (Hatchet: 112). Because he does not know, he must start over from a primitive mindset, and invent survival again. He must find his place in the ecosystem, a foreigner in a hostile land.
Paulsen believes that knowledge is the key to wilderness survival, and that this way of life is a necessary component to happiness and self-understanding. Because much of the knowledge that the ancestors fought for has been lost, it must be rediscovered through curiosity, trial, and error. After spending days attempting to birth fire using only a rock and a hatchet, Paulsen finally succeeds: “I felt as early man must have felt when he discovered fire” (Guts: 126). The reward for creativity, persistence and determination is another day of life, another meal, and another moment. The pride and joy of self-reliance are sensations that appear throughout Hatchet and throughout Paulsen’s adventure in Guts, highlighting the spiritual-emotional value that the knowledge of survival and self-sustainability offers.
The Impact of Solitude on Coming of Age
Hatchet is a coming-of-age story in which a young man must struggle to survive in the wild, ill-prepared, without guidance, and alone. While surviving in the wilderness, Brian also matures into a self-reliant young adult. In the process, he deals with emotional stressors and familial conflict typical of adolescence, but he processes these issues in solitude while channeling his energy into becoming a better version of himself. Brian’s character arc reflects a bildungsroman narrative, though his journey to adulthood takes place in a uniquely isolated and harsh setting. Paulsen discusses his coming-of-age story, Hatchet, in Guts, while also explaining how Brian’s character reflects his own personal growth in the wilderness.
Throughout Hatchet, Brian struggles emotionally with his parents’ divorce, and a secret: his mother is having an affair. To survive, Brian must not only face a harsh wilderness, find food and shelter, and locate rescue, but also he must conquer his fears and come to peace with his parents’ divorce and his mother’s affair. In Hatchet’s epilogue, Paulsen reveals that Brian, “never said a word about the man or what he knew, the Secret” to his father (Hatchet: 195). With this, Brian survives the wild, the divorce, and the secret, and steps into adulthood prepared to tackle the complexities of life. This reflects a typical coming-of-age character arc, and Brian’s circumstances in the wild help him overcome his emotional obstacles. The setting, in rough, challenging isolation, plays a major role in his character growth as it gives Brian both time and space for self-reflection while allowing him to channel his frustration and energy into a greater purpose, putting his thoughts into perspective.
“So much of what I did as a boy came to be part of Brian—all of it, in some ways” Paulsen writes (Guts: Foreword). His childhood is strikingly similar to Brian’s. As a boy, his parents were separated for years, and his mother had an affair, which disturbed Paulsen greatly (source: Eastern Sun, Winter Moon: An Autobiographical Odyssey). Where Brian’s father took an oil field job far away, Paulsen’s father was a military officer serving in the Philippines. Regardless, neither boy had a father figure during the pivotal teenage years. Both boys had to learn self-reliance on their own. Brian learns through his forced ordeal while Paulsen willingly learns by striking out into nature.
After weeks in the wild, Brian learns that he has changed, that he is capable of survival and of recovering from setbacks: “there is a difference now, he thought—there really is a difference. I might be hit but I’m not done” (Hatchet: 157). After firing homemade arrows from his homemade bow for hours and hitting nothing, Paulsen remains undaunted by his failure. “There had to be a better way,” he thinks, pausing to trial new ideas (Guts: 89). He is motivated to try another method, because like Brian, he knows that he has gained confidence in his ability to survive.
Hatchet is a classic fictional bildungsroman, though it is also an account of how the author found solace and self-reliance in the wilderness. Because so much of the novel is based on Paulsen’s life, it serves as an addendum to Guts, and offers insight into Paulsen’s observations about a childhood spent in the forest.
The Necessity of Accurately Portraying the Wild
With Hatchet, Paulsen wanted to paint a realistic picture of what the northern wilderness is like, as well as what it would be like to survive alone in that setting. He did not want a romanticized or dramatized survival story with a capable hero who conquered nature to become legend. In contrast, Paulsen opted for a protagonist who is inexperienced, young, and without ego, and then placed him in a setting that is dangerous, raw, and populated by unglamorous challenges.
Accuracy lies at the heart of what makes Hatchet believable. Because Paulsen himself had extensive experienced in the north woods by the time he wrote Hatchet, he knew what his young protagonist would face. He incorporated animal, weather, insect, and foraging hurdles along with the dire and imperative search for food and shelter. To ensure everything in the novel was accurate, Paulsen meticulously tested anything that was new to him. Upon finding raw turtle eggs Paulsen thinks about Brian and the likelihood that he would come across eggs during his lake-side survival scenario. Paulsen swallows the eggs, though he is unable to keep them down, writing, “it was one bit of research I couldn’t finish, through I tried three times” (Guts: 132). Paulsen also mines his past for tested, accurate techniques for Brian to invent in the novel. The bow and arrow that Brian crafts in Hatchet is based on the bow Paulsen built and tested as a child, for example.
Paulsen writes for a culture in which the wilderness is often romanticized, sometimes to devastating effect. At age 14, Paulsen saw a white-tailed deer attack and kill a four-year-old boy who was hand-feeding it mints in a state park. The mother stood nearby, taking photos of the cute encounter when the deer’s sharp hooves slashed through the child. Behind the boy’s body was a sign that read Don’t Feed the Deer. Paulsen uses this story to demonstrate the “desire to ignore the truth in favor of drama” (Guts: 52). People worry about bears, wolves, and mountain lions, but the deer and mosquitos are statistically deadlier. Paulsen wanted Hatchet to be a story where the realities of the wild were not sacrificed for the sake of drama, leaning into the brutal mundane instead of hyper focusing on romanticized survival.
The romanticization of the wild was stripped away in Hatchet as Brian struggles with deviating mosquito attacks, bouts of stomach distress, and unglamorous failures in foraging and hunting. Although Brian learns to love the woods and value how it changes him, his first experience in the wild is one designed to strip away any narrow-minded, romantic perceptions of what he would face. Immediately after the crash, Brian struggles with shock, only coming out of it because the mosquitos attack. “It was not possible. Not his. He has come through the crash, but the insects were not possible. He coughed them up, spat them out, sneezed them out, close hid eyes and kept brushing his face, slapping and crushing them by the dozens, by the hundreds” (Hatchet: 37).
The wild is also dramatized in American culture, concealing the harsh realities of survivalism behind flashy stories. Paulsen himself was guilty of dramatizing the men of the wild, “Thinking that of all the people who lives in an extreme manner the mountain men must have been the most radical. They’d head off with nothing but a horse and rifle and seemingly ride into legend” (Guts: 63). His research, however, revealed that rather than riding into legend, most fur trappers died within their first year in the wild. The dramatization and legend of the mountain men suggested a cause for their demise that wasn’t accurate: “The big killer wasn’t bear attacks, or Indian attacks, or mountain-lion attacks—which I’m afraid most sources talk about,” but rather malnutrition and illness (Guts: 63). There is little drama in the reality of how nature’s dangers present in the wild. Infected mosquito bites and dysentery hardly make for good literature or television, and yet Paulsen’s Hatchet remains relevant precisely because it rings true.
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