87 pages • 2 hours read
Matt de la PeñaThe Living
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2013A 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.
Day 6, Chapters 38-40Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapters 38-40 Summary
When morning comes, it becomes clear that the lifeboat has started taking on water again. Shy and Addison manage to bail the water out and patch the hole in the hull, but Shy has become so weak that he can barely remain conscious. Still delirious, Shy once again considers how unlikely their friendship is, noting “how strange that the two of them had ended up here together. They were from opposite worlds. In real life they wouldn’t have been friends in a million years, but out here they were all each other had” (217). At Addison’s request, Shy tells her that he was given the nickname “Shy” as a shorthand for a way his father used to tease him, saying: “‘Any time I fell or knocked something over my dad would be like, ‘Damn, this kid doesn’t know shit from Shinola.’ It happened a lot, I guess, so he started calling me Shinola. By the time I started school he’d shortened it to plain old Shy.’” He avoids talking about his father’s abuse, however, brushing off Addison’s sympathy. The two grow closer as they talk, bonding over the fact that neither of them believes they have ever been in love.
As the sun sets, Addison asks about Shy’s grandmother, revealing that her father once told her that “Romero Disease was made up by the media to scare people” (222). Shy explains how Romero Disease progresses in its victims, and Addison is upset to learn that her father has been lying to her. Shy catches another fish, but a shark attacks the boat and takes the fish—and their last hook—before he can reel it in. Addison impulsively shoots the last two flares at the shark before Shy can stop her, then breaks down in tears. Shy comforts her, even though he knows that their chances of survival have now dropped to near zero:
‘It’s okay,’ he repeated again and again. Even when he saw that the water was dripping through a crack in his patch job again—because of the impact of the shark. Or when he realized the oar was no longer in the boat, but floating on the surface of the ocean somewhere. Still. He repeated these words to Addie. ‘It’s okay.’ (224).
The sun sets, and Shy and Addison grow increasingly sure that they are going to die. As Shy considers this possibility, it brings him some amount of peace:
And once he accepted this fact, a weight lifted from his shoulders. Because this was how everything worked. The ocean’s whispering and the earthquakes and the fires and the sinking ship and people diving overboard and dying and new people being born. Some are lucky enough to be given a part to play, but when that part ends the world doesn’t end, too, it goes on spinning just like before (226).
Shy and Addison finish the last of the water, hold hands, and close their eyes, waiting to die. Shy reminisces on his life and his family and decides that while he may not have accomplished much, “he was happy knowing he’d made his mom feel proud” (227). As the boat takes on more water, Addison tells him: “I think I was going to love you, Shy” (227). Shy suddenly feels as though he is lucky to have lived the life he had and accepts his death. Then, just as he blacks out, Shy is lifted from the boat and carried to safety.
Day 6 Analysis
Day 6 shows the development of Shy and Addison’s relationship into its truest form. There is no longer any barrier of class or race keeping them at odds, and they have come to rely on each other for survival and comfort over the last few days. They open up to each other about their childhoods, the people they have lost, and the fact that neither of them has ever been in love. They are still starving and running out of water, but the tone in these scenes is comfortable and companionable—it’s almost possible to forget how close they are to death at any given moment.
Then, of course, a reminder of that ever-present danger returns in the form of a shark. The shark steals Shy’s second fish and the last hook, crashes into the boat hard enough to crack the hull open, and frustrates Addison into firing the last two flares into the water. In an instant, their chances of survival fall to almost nothing, shifting the tone of the scene from a moment of happiness to one of complete despair. The hope that Shy had been holding onto until now finally diminishes as starvation, dehydration, and the slowly sinking boat take their toll: “Shy was so weak now it took effort just to breathe. His thoughts were faraway and clouded. All he understood as he stared up at the moon was that they were going to die” (226). Shy finally gives up and accepts his death, which brings him some comfort; he is happy to have lived, glad to have been part of the world that he now sees as one unified living thing:
The world itself was alive, too. It swirled around you and sped past your eyes and ears, so fast you could never see it, but slow at the same time, like a tree growing taller in a park. And all the sounds you heard—the wind whipping past your ears and the ocean’s whispering and the trickle of whitecaps against your boat—that was the earth’s blood pumping through imperceptible veins, and some of those veins were nothing more than people like Shy or Carmen or Addie (228).
Although Shoeshine arrives just in time to save them and bring them back to Jones Island, this new outlook on life stays with Shy from this point on. After he comes back from the brink of death, the flashbacks and nightmares he has been having since David’s suicide recede. Shy is still traumatized and still fighting to survive, but at this moment he turns a corner and is finally able to begin distancing himself from the guilt and fear he has felt for weeks.
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