Theme

Your plane just crashed. Flames flicker as you drag yourself to a ripped piece clothing to stop the bleeding on one of your injuries. You’re stuck on the top of a mountain capped with snow. Good thing you brought your survival guide…Survival is everything. Its what keeps you alive. When  there is a threat to your life or anything, the only way to get through it is to survive.

In the book My Side of the Mountain, Sam Gribley feels crowded in his New York City apartment with his family so he decides to run away to the Catskill Mountains. Sam can’t just walk into a wilderness and live there though. He is going to need to know how to survive using hunting skills, hiding, building, awareness, etc.

Even towards the end, the theme is always survival. He’s always talking about how to skin animals and build houses and fires out of trees, etc. Some of it is almost like a survival guide sometimes.

Island of the Blue Dolphins is another book about survival. Karana, the main character, is part of an native tribe on an island that looks like a dolphin. One day a ship of Aleuts from Russia come to hunt sea otter but the natives want to be payed back. One day the Aleuts try to leave without paying though, so a battle breaks out. The tribe leaves the island after most of their people die, hoping to find new land. But they leave Karana behind, making her face the wilderness alone. There is a pack of vicious wild dogs after her, and she has no house yet. By collecting whale bones and other things, Karana builds a house. Later, her brother swims back to the island to live with her. They tough out the rest of the book by using whatever they can find to survive. Island of the Blue Dolphins is a perfect example of survival.

Throughout these two books, the theme of survival stays strong. In My Side of the Mountain Sam realizes that if he wants to live in the wilderness it comes with the risk of having to get everything on your own and live independently without starving or dying or anything, and I think that’s what survival is all about.