Sounder

Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1969

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-8

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 4 Summary

Content Warning: This section of the guide features depictions of racism and incarceration.

The boy and his siblings sit by the fire and wait for their mother to return. The children become impatient and wonder what she will bring them, but the boy warns them not to expect anything. When he sees his mother coming down the road, the boy is disappointed that his father is not with her. She has sold her walnuts and bought meat, potatoes, and vanilla.

Hearing the bad news about Sounder, the mother wonders whether the dog is in the woods, trying to heal himself in the swamp. She tells the boy that dogs instinctively use oak leaves on their wounds, and she suggests that Sounder might come back in a few days. The boy plans to check the oak grove the next day. As he shells the nuts, the boy wonders who keeps the jails warm, and he asks his mother to tell him the Bible story about Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.

The next day, the boy checks the oak woods for Sounder but returns home empty-handed and distressed. His mother tells him that he must “learn to lose,” and she also reflects that their family seems “born to lose” (35). Weeks go by, and there is still no sign of Sounder.

When Christmastime arrives, the mother bakes two cakes: one for her and the children, and one for their father in jail. Because women are not allowed in the jail, she asks the boy to carry the cake to his father. He nervously agrees, and as he walks, he remembers being in town with his father at Christmastime, selling berries and mistletoe. As he gets closer to town, he grows fearful, worrying that people will stop him or question him. He sees the pretty shops and thinks of the toys that he has received for Christmas in the past. He wishes that someone would give him a book so that he could teach himself to read.

The boy hurries to the jail and nervously approaches the large door. The sheriff lets him in but also destroys the cake, claiming that it could have a blade hidden inside. As the boy cleans up the crumbs, he is devastated, and he fantasizes about hurting the sheriff. He is allowed to bring the ruined cake to his father, who tells him to comfort his mother and promises to return home soon. He also instructs the boy not to come back to the jail. The boy is too sad to speak much, but he tries to tell his father about Sounder’s disappearance. After they have only a brief visit, the sheriff tells the boy to leave.

Chapter 5 Summary

The boy walks home, feeling sad and hopeless. He wishes that a stray pup would come and follow him, just like Sounder had once done to his father. He hopes that his father doesn’t disappear in a chain gang, never to be heard from again. When he arrives home, he tells his mother about the visit, but he doesn’t mention the problem with the cake.

In the morning, the boy hears a little whine. When he opens the door, Sounder is there. The boy is astonished to see his dog, who greets him joyfully. However, Sounder is starving and seriously injured; one of his eyes is missing, and he has only three legs and has also sustained a wound on his ear. Sounder’s behavior is also different. Now disabled, the dog is not athletic and strong, and he just hops around the cabin porch and a little ways down the road, always looking at the place where the boy’s father was taken away. He never barks; he only whines gently.

The boy wonders how his father is. Because the prison is so far away and his father has discouraged him from visiting, the boy cannot help but think that the father is separated from the family by a vast, impassable distance. Because the boy’s parents are illiterate, they cannot write each other letters or read any messages. At one point, the boy dreams that a man comes to him and asks him if he wants to learn to read. The mother asks the people she works for to read her the newspapers’ court news, and one night, she learns that her husband has been sentenced to hard labor. The boy and his mother are relieved that the father will not be sent out of state, and they hope that his sentence will not last very long.

Chapter 6 Summary

As the seasons pass, the boy continues to work hard for his parents’ usual employers, and he never stops wondering about where his father is. He wants to go looking for his father over the county, but his mother is reluctant to allow this. In the autumn when the fieldwork is done, the boy travels around, visiting the farms and quarries where prisoners often work, and asking about his father. While some of the guards remember him, each inquiry leads to a dead end. Whenever he sees groups of prisoners, he tries to pick his father’s face or gait out of the crowd of men.

As he looks for his father, the boy spends more time in town, and he gathers newspapers and magazines from the trash bins to practice his reading. As he travels and sleeps outside at night, he thinks of the Bible stories that he learned from his mother. These stories comfort and inspire him, since stories about righteous characters like Jacob and David always have happy endings.

Chapters 4-6 Analysis

In these chapters, the author continues to add new depth to his portrayal of Surviving Racism and Hostility. By describing the boy’s negative experiences at the local prison, the author emphasizes his innocence and vulnerability in the face of systemic racism and injustice. The sheriff’s cruel behavior towards the boy makes him feel frightened and upset, but he maintains his composure and carries on with his visit, and the simple clarity of the author’s prose conveys an implicit sense of the boy’s inner strength. As the narrative states, “The boy stood up. He felt weak and his knees shook, but there were no more tears in his eyes” (40). This scene implies that he holds back his tears largely because he knows that responding emotionally to the sheriff’s behavior will do more harm than good. In sharp contrast to the boy’s innate resilience in the face of injustice, the “bull-necked” sheriff is shown to be rude and violent, and it is clear that the boy and his father cannot hope for fair treatment from the authorities. These tense scenes bolster the author’s focus on the traumatic effects of racism, and the boy’s vulnerability is highlighted as he struggles to cope with society’s hostility towards him and his father.

In the face of these challenges, the boy continues to turn to The Power of Storytelling as a distraction and a comfort. For example, when the boy worries for his father, who has recently been taken to prison, he remembers his mother’s tale about the biblical figures of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who were imprisoned by “some mean governor or sheriff” (34) and put in the prison’s fiery oven. As he recalls the story of how God rescued the men from their death sentence, the boy is comforted by the miracle in the tale’s climax. His interest in uplifting stories is further illustrated when he begs his mother to tell him about “Joseph in the jail and the stone quarry in Egypt and chiselin’ out rocks to make ol’ Pharoah’s gravestone” (34). Notably, both of these Bible stories focus on themes of imprisonment and escape from seemingly impossible circumstances, and the boy clearly draws hope from triumphant stories of escape.

However, there is a darker side to the boy’s reliance on others to tell him stories, for he continues to be frustrated by his inability to plunge into the world of stories on his own. Thus, these scenes make it clear that his illiteracy holds him back from fully unleashing his potential, and his desire to learn to read highlights his love of stories even as it reveals the true depths of the discrimination that his family suffers. As the narrative states, “He always wished they would give his mother an old book. He was sure he could learn to read if he had a book” (36). Notably, the boy’s dream foreshadows his relationship with the school teacher later in the book, for he envisions that a man approaches him and notices his efforts to learn, then asks him, “Child, you want to learn, don’t you?” (44). These passages show that the boy relies on storytelling to keep himself calm and hopeful in the midst of his family’s crisis, and these details are designed to foreshadow the fact that he will someday achieve his goal of learning to read.

The boy’s other source of comfort is Sounder, and the deep relationship between the two speaks to the author’s focus on The Bond between Dogs and Their Humans. By describing the boy’s desperation to find his lost dog, Armstrong emphasizes the protagonist’s deep need to reconnect with this dog who is also his only real companion in the world, other than his family. His exhaustive efforts to find the wounded dog emphasize the full extent of his loyalty to Sounder, and he willingly suffers considerable hardship in the search. The author’s descriptions linger over the boy’s endeavor in order to convey the sad tone of the scene, and the narrative states, “The next day [the boy] walked the great woodlands, calling Sounder’s name […] When he got home after dark, his clothes were torn. His throat hurt with a great lump choking him” (35). This visceral description conveys the full extent of the boy’s misery, and his devastation strikes a sharp contrast with Sounder’s sudden reappearance and demonstrations of love for the boy. As Sounder’s “tail wag[s] faster, and he lick[s] the boy’s hand” (44), the emotional reunion between boy and dog shows their mutual reliance upon each other.