44 pages • 1 hour read
Craig SilveyJasper Jones
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2009A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary
Charlie is afraid of bugs, and there is a wasp in his room. His mother tells him that if he is to see Jeffrey today, he must either stay in Jeffrey’s house or stay on the street nearby. Charlie sees a news article about the possibility of more Australians being sent to fight in the Vietnam War. His father is against the war. When Charlie finds out that Jeffrey is grounded and cannot play that day, he goes to the library instead and reads about murderers, trying to understand why they did what they did. Some of them were bullied or lonely, and he then thinks about Jeffrey and Jasper. He realizes the extent of the awful things that people can do and wonders whether everyone has it in them to do awful things. He also thinks about people who have witnessed crimes and failed to report them. For example, he reads about Gertrude Baniszewski, who was able to convince both her children and other children to participate in the torture of a child.
Eliza walks by and asks Charlie if he wants to walk her home. He wonders if he should hold her hand and is frustrated that he cannot find anything interesting to say. They talk about movies and books, and Eliza tells Charlie that her sister, Laura, is missing. Her mother is distraught, and her father just continues to drink and yell. She tells him that a search is being organized. He feels like a “phoney” for trying to look after his own interests while Eliza is hurting. Eliza’s mother comes out worried because Eliza had been gone, and Charlie thinks that Eliza knows something.
When Charlie gets home, his mom slaps him for leaving without permission and tells him that there is a kidnapper at large. As punishment, she makes him dig a very large hole in the yard despite the intense heat. Charlie does not know when his mother became so hardened. She came from money, but his father did not. He thinks that she started playing a role once his baby sister died. She leaves sometimes for extended trips, but she is still bitter when she comes home. After he has been digging for hours, his mother comes outside and tells him to refill the hole. This infuriates Charlie. Eventually, Charlie’s father, Wes, comes out and tells him to stop. Wes explains that since nobody knows what happened to Laura, they are trying to be as careful as possible. He explains that they will widen the search, and Charlie worries that the search group might find Jasper’s secret location. Wes believes that Laura is a troubled girl because she never lets people get close to her, but he thinks that murder is highly unlikely. Before Charlie goes to his room, he asks his father whether he writes in his study at night, but Wes says that he usually reads. Charlie wishes Jasper would come to his window.
Chapter 4 Summary
Charlie tells Jeffrey that he had a nightmare about The Wizard of Oz, and Jeffrey taunts Charlie for having a crush on Eliza. The streets are empty, but Charlie spots some spotter planes and worries that they might be there for him. He goes home to ask his father for more details about the capabilities of the planes, but Wes is not home. Jeffrey tells Charlie that a bomb killed some of his family members who lived in a village in Vietnam. His mother is very upset. His parents are trying to have the children join them in Australia so they can care for them, but the children will likely stay in Vietnam with other family members. Jeffrey’s mom wanted to go back to the country, but his father stopped her. Charlie and Jeffrey consider whether people would want to know when they are dying, and they think that discomfort with death is the real reason that people only believe in heaven and Jesus, whom they refer to as “Cheeses” (121). Charlie is frustrated that words frequently fail him when he cannot think of an appropriate thing to say to Jeffrey about his family.
A news broadcast about Laura states that she “was at home and in bed on Thursday night” (123). Wes tells Charlie that Laura would occasionally go out for walks at night, and people think that she may have been meeting someone, but this is just conjecture. Dive crews will search for her in the morning, and Wes tells Charlie that he cannot help with the search. Later, Charlie wishes that he had talked to his father about Jeffrey and Vietnam. He believes that the loss of Jeffrey’s family should be on the news, but he also knows that a person cannot care deeply about everything in the world and still function. He wonders if the world has always been as dark as it has seemed the past few days, and he wonders what kind of world lets such terrible things happen. He wonders what will happen to the Wisharts if no one ever finds Laura’s body and if he and Jasper do not find out who murdered her. He does not know if it would be a comfort or a torture not to know what happened to her. He realizes that unless the Wisharts know that Laura is dead, they will not be able to move on. He decides that not knowing must be the worse of the two fates.
Chapters 3-4 Analysis
In this section of the novel, the theme of Using Literature to Broaden Perspective appears once again as Charlie turns to the library to help answer hard questions that he is afraid to ask aloud. Given his recent experiences, the topic of evil and the motivations of murderers hold a special fascination for him, for he feels compelled to make some sense of what he has seen and must chart a way forward for himself as well. The author also uses the drift of Charlie’s research to demonstrate the concepts and ideals in which the boy truly believes. It is soon apparent that far from being religious, Charlie is irreverent toward religion in general and therefore cannot find meaning from such sources. Likewise, he cannot share his secret with other people, so instead he turns to the wisdom of the ages as passed down through books, both fiction and nonfiction. For example, he often turns toward fictional characters like Atticus Finch when he looks for heroes, but now, when he is trying to understand evil, he looks to nonfiction and the stories of actual killers to try to make sense of the senseless reality of Laura’s death. Whenever Charlie is faced with a dilemma that the people around him cannot help him to solve, he turns to literature for insight into other people’s lives.
When Charlie is with Eliza, he uses the word “phoney” to describe himself. This is a word used quite frequently by the protagonist of another bildungsroman, Holden Caulfield, in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Because the word is used so frequently in Salinger’s work, a comparison to that book is implicitly drawn when Silvey uses it. Caulfield uses the word to describe most adults in his world, and it is a trait that he explicitly criticizes. He believes that children have the grace of innocence and that a part of the maturation process into adulthood is to take on the trait of phoniness, which to him refers to a false artifice. When Silvey uses the same word, he further emphasizes how Charlie is moving from a state of innocence toward one of maturity. Despite his current difficulties, Charlie has a few solid role models, and thus, unlike Salinger’s Caulfield, he does not think that adulthood implicitly requires one to be less than authentic, but he does see a transition in himself away from the unbridled innocence he enjoyed before learning about life’s more sordid realities.
In addition to the internal drama that Charlie must navigate on his way to an early adulthood, Silvey also builds suspense by developing the mystery of Laura’s life and troubles little by little as the novel progresses. For example, Jasper reveals quite early on that Laura would sometimes seem to be distracted or lost in thought when the two were together. In Chapter 3, the author intensifies the sense that all was not well in Laura’s world when Wes tells his son that when Laura was his student, she often seemed troubled. These details indicate that Laura may not have been a victim of a random crime, for her issues clearly predate her death. As the author’s strategically sparse yet evocative details encourage readers to play detective, the implied focus of the narrative shifts to questions of whether Laura was being hurt or abused and, if so, whether her mysterious abuser was also her murderer. The other unspoken possibility that asserts itself is that of a potential suicide. Charlie does not have answers to these questions as of yet, but it is notable that Charlie himself does not explicitly consider these possibilities, and his lack of insight hints at the inherent unreliability of his narration. The author crafts the story in such a way that readers glean far more information from Charlie’s conversations than the boy himself is capable of discerning. In addition to highlighting Charlie’s relative inexperience with the ways of the world, this also shows that he has not taken responsibility for finding the truth. He intellectually wants to understand why bad things happen, but he is only interested in finding the truth insofar as it can exonerate Jasper and bring peace to Laura’s family.
The ongoing issues of racism have a profound effect on whose lives matter the most to society in this small Australian town. This theme becomes most prominent through the news broadcast, for it diligently reports many details surrounding Laura’s disappearance and the resulting search to find her while ignoring other incidents of equal or greater impact simply because they happened to a marginalized group of people. Because Laura comes from a prominent family in Corrigan and she is a young white female, much attention is paid to her disappearance. By contrast, Jeffrey’s family was killed by a bomb in Vietnam, and this does not make the news. On a practical level, Charlie understands that people simply cannot care about every tragedy that happens in the world because people would not be able to function if they did. Still, he recognizes that in his culture and news sphere, some lives seem to matter far more than others. This theme will be more fully considered by Silvey as the novel progresses and Jasper’s fate is explored.
