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Chapter 7
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Blueback, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Nature, Belonging, and Conservation
Family and Love
Greed and Environmental Destruction
The Ocean and Life’s Mysteries
Time, Change, and Continuity
Summary
Analysis
On the shore, Abel and his mother watch Costello work. Costello and his partner keep hauling abalone and fish, but fortunately Blueback stays safe from them. Later that afternoon, a Fisheries patrol boat enters Longboat Bay and tows Costello’s boat away. Weeks later, Abel learns that Costello was fined. Now Costello has lost his license and business. Abel feels slightly disappointed that he never got to confront the “real life villain” face to face.
As the Fisheries Department brings Costello to justice, the novel reinforces that overfishing is harmful to the environment and should be prevented. Furthermore, when Abel calls Costello a villain, he emphasizes the wrongfulness of Costello’s greed and viciousness, which have hurt Longboat Bay.
Themes
During that same summer, Abel discovers a tiger shark in the bay. A hook has pierced through its jaw, chaining the shark to a red buoy. The shark can’t dive deeper in the sea to feed itself, so it’s starving to death near the surface. Abel pities the suffering shark, but he can’t save it. By the next morning, the shark has washed up, dead, on the beach. Abel notices that the red buoy bears Costello’s name. Abel cuts the shark free and releases its body in the sea. When Abel goes back to school, he feels older. The past summer has taught him there’s “nothing in nature as cruel and savage as a greedy human being.”
The tiger shark suffers and dies because it gets caught in Costello’s equipment, which Costello neglected to take proper care of. Greedy and selfish, Costello cared only about profiting off Longboat Bay. His callous indifference toward sea life resulted in the shark’s needlessly painful demise. Witnessing the shark’s suffering and discovering that Costello is responsible for it leads Abel to conclude that humans are capable of terrible cruelty against nature. Learning this harsh lesson gives Abel a new perspective on humanity and marks the loss of his childhood innocence.
Themes
