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Summary
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Breath, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Ordinary vs. Extraordinary
Risk, Fear, and Ecstasy
Time, Nostalgia, and Historical Change
Friendship, Mentorship, and Coming of Age
Summary
Analysis
On a shady street in a Western Australian town, Bruce Pike (the narrator) and Jodie are hurtling in their ambulance toward the source of an emergency call. Bruce pretends to act nervous about Jodie’s wild driving, but in reality he feels thrilled, as he always does during high-intensity situations. Bruce implies that he and Jodie are not particularly friendly to one another. Bruce doesn’t genuinely dislike her but thinks she’s inexperienced; unbeknownst to Jodie, he has daughters her age.
The novel’s opening introduces Bruce as a man with secrets and a complicated past. He gets a rush out of nerve-wracking scenarios, but he feels the need to keep this feeling concealed. His age and experience impose a communicative barrier between him and his co-worker. The fact that Jodie doesn’t know about his daughters suggests that he keeps his private life separate from work.
Themes
They arrive at the house that called and find indications of tragedy: a man with a broken collarbone sits balled up in the yard, and inside, two teenage sisters direct Bruce and Jodie upstairs, hardly moving. Upstairs, they find middle-aged June over the dead body of her 17-year-old son Aaron. He’s hanged himself, but she’s already taken him down and tried to clean and tend to the body. Aaron has several bruises on his neck, some old.
The hectic scene of this tragedy gives a glimpse into the horrors that Bruce encounters regularly as a paramedic. It is implied that the father’s collarbone was broken in breaking down his son’s door, though not in time to save him. The old bruises on the boy’s neck suggest some prior attempt at asphyxiation.
Themes
June is resistant to Bruce’s request to look in the boy’s wardrobe and seems generally unwilling to admit something. Bruce reminds her that he’s not the police but encourages her to tell the truth when the police do begin investigating, as they are obliged to do. She seems wistful and resigned. Looking around Aaron’s room, Bruce notices surfing posters, sports trophies, and a computer screensaver with a continuous loop of the Twin Towers collapsing.
June’s defensiveness suggests that she knows something shameful related to her boy’s hanging, or at least something she’s reluctant to admit, and Bruce picks up on this right away. His gentle inquiries, however, don’t imply that he suspects her of any wrongdoing. The boy’s screensaver suggests a disturbed mind.
Themes
Back in the ambulance, Jodie suggests that Bruce was flirting with June. Bruce counters by referencing a recent incident where he caught Jodie badmouthing him on the phone to a friend. Jodie clearly feels guilty about this, and she’s suddenly on the verge of tears. She says that this call was her first suicide response. Bruce says that Aaron’s death was accidental, but he refuses to explain how he knows this.
Jodie’s overheard complaints reveal that Bruce can be frustrating to work with, which his refusal to explain his bold claim about the hanged boy seems to confirm. Nevertheless, Jodie’s emotional volatility here backs up Bruce’s assertion that she’s “green,” i.e., inexperienced and out of her depth.
Themes
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That night, Bruce dreams that he’s drowning, when a figure approaches from above to rescue him. When he gets close, Bruce realizes that the figure is himself. His double hesitates uncertainly, while Bruce blows a stream of bubbles. He wakes in his dingy flat, goes out on his balcony, and blows his didjeridu at the sea.
Bruce’s dream hints at some buried psychic trauma, possibly involving an inability to save himself. His nonchalant morning routine upon waking, however, suggests that while it’s disturbing, this dream is nothing new to him.
Themes
Bruce breaks off his narrative to recount his boyhood in the mill town of Sawyer. He was an only child and naturally solitary, with parents on the older side. His father would take him fishing with his friends from the sawmill, but they would never venture past the estuary. Like everyone in the town, Bruce only swam in the river, but he would fantasize about the distant sea and its destructive power.
Bruce’s turn to reflecting on his youth quickly begins to explain some already-suggested features of his adult personality. His solitary boyhood is continuous with his unwillingness to communicate with Jodie, and his fraught relationship with the sea that his dream hinted at turns out to have roots in his childhood as well.
Themes
One day at the river, a mother and her daughters frantically hail young Bruce and tell him a boy is drowning. As Bruce prepares to jump in and rescue him, the boy leaps up cackling, revealing his endangerment as a prank. The boy is Loonie, a year older than Bruce and equally fond of daredevil antics. They spend the day competing to hold their breaths the longest underwater and quickly become “friends and rivals.” Loonie dubs Bruce “Pikelet,” derived from his last name.
Loonie’s wild prankster energy—evoked in his very name—contrasts with Bruce’s more solemn disposition, but they are both attracted to challenges and extremes, hence both their friendship and their rivalry. Loonie’s dubbing Bruce with the diminutive nickname “Pikelet” is a way of light-heartedly asserting his dominance over Bruce.
Themes
Loonie’s wild presence makes Bruce’s staid parents uncomfortable, and they don’t fully approve of their son’s new friend. However, Loonie’s jolly nature eventually wins over the father enough to let him join their fishing trips. Bruce and Loonie spend their days messing around and pulling reckless stunts, like playing chicken with trucks on the highway.
This period of Bruce’s life sees him starting to drift away from his cautious and quiet parents and beginning to develop his own identity, under the influence of Loonie. The boys’ stunts are dangerous but presented as harmless fun.
Themes
In the present, Bruce reflects on how unbelievable this childhood seems to people today. He is therefore happy not to discuss it, for fear of being called nostalgic or a liar, even though he is not. He recognizes that his silence about his past aligns him with his father, likewise a poor communicator. Yet he knows that the memories evoked by the suffocated boy tonight cannot be explained to some inexperienced newcomer like Jodie.
Bruce begins to deepen the enigmatic sense of foreboding that clings to his past, which he demarcates sharply from the present. He elaborates on the roots of his poor communication skills that were displayed in the opening scene with Jodie, explicitly tying them to his father. This difficulty, however, is insufficient to explain the incommunicability of whatever darkness he experienced in his youth.
Themes
Returning to his childhood narrative, Bruce recalls his frustration with his father banning him from swimming in the ocean, but he knows deep down that his father refuses because he can’t swim well enough to rescue his son. Loonie, however, reveals that Bruce’s reluctance really stems from having seen a man swallowed by a rogue wave many years ago.
Bruce’s father emerges as a more complex figure than was previously apparent. His refusal to speak about a source of trauma in his past foreshadows Bruce’s own situation as an adult, although the reader still does not know what Bruce’s trauma consists of.
Themes
Encouraged by Loonie’s impertinence, Bruce lets his urge to swim in the ocean overrule his obedience to his father. The boys ride their bikes down to the shore, and Loonie hitches onto the tailpiece of a pickup truck. After tossing Loonie, the truck stops to let the boys in. Three older guys ride up front, while the boys ride in back with a dog and a 16-year-old girl. When they reach the beach, the older guys go surfing while Loonie and Bruce watch with the girl. Bruce is mesmerized. They ride home, and Bruce’s father is furious when he figures out where they’ve been, but it’s too late: just watching the surfers has hooked him on the sport.
Loonie had been helping Bruce emerge from his shell for a long time by now, and here he decisively functions as the catalyst to break Bruce free from his father’s authoritarian rules. The excitement of getting to hang out with older kids merely compounds the thrill of seeing surfing for the first time. Bruce’s immediate infatuation with the sport indicates the transformative power of this day for him. More ominously, it hints at an addictive personality and one-track mind.
Themes
In the present, Bruce has realized that his reaction to watching the surfers was so strong because he’d never seen men doing something beautiful before in his gruff blue-collar town. Loonie and Bruce never discussed beauty in their subsequent surfing lives, although it secretly attracted Bruce to the sport as much as the endorphin rush and the courage required.
In middle age, Bruce feels free to discuss beauty in a way that would have been totally out of place in his macho boyhood environment. As a kid, his attraction to beauty sets him apart from those around him, but there is no way to express this attraction without inviting ridicule.
Themes
That summer, Bruce and Loonie return to the beach again and again, buying cheap makeshift surfboards and modding them out to become just functional enough to allow them to learn to surf. Bruce’s father chucks the board out in the weeds whenever he finds it, but never mentions it to Bruce. His mother tends his sunburns, but likewise never confronts him about their cause. Bruce’s father takes his new lifestyle as a painful betrayal (although he would never admit it), and they cease going fishing together regularly.
Bruce and Loonie’s efforts to make their own surfboards show their burning desire to learn the sport. Bruce’s father’s response embodies both his stern authoritarianism and his poor communicative skills. Bruce recognizes that his new hobby is damaging his relationship with his father, but he’s so committed to surfing that he simply accepts this.
Themes
Loonie starts going to the agricultural school in the new year, introducing him to a rougher crowd. Outside of school, he and Bruce are as committed to surfing as ever, although the rough winter seas are too dangerous for their skill level, and they’re forced to watch more experienced surfers, getting their thrills vicariously. Among this more experienced crowd is a solitary older man who tackles any wave while remaining totally casual. The boys can’t figure out who he is.
Loonie’s new school friends are a sign that he and Bruce will not be able to remain bound at the hip like they have thus far, and they may even grow apart in some respects. However, they compensate for this distance by committing their extracurricular lives all the more intensely to surfing together. The introduction of the mysterious surfer foreshadows a possible eventual meeting with him.
Themes
When the sea is too rough to surf, Bruce and Loonie go to the local river and try to hold their breaths for two minutes underwater, clinging to the roots on the riverbed. Loonie’s father Karl finds them there one day, numb from their exploits. He chastises them, but then agrees to pay the boys for chopping his wood at the pub he runs. Customers see them and begin offering them more wood-chopping work, and the boys start saving money. Soon, they are able to buy real surfboards, and Bruce’s father stops chucking his son’s in the weeds. He recognizes the work Bruce has done to afford the board and begins to respect him again.
Bruce and Loonie substitute breath-holding contests for surfing when the latter is unavailable, showing that surfing is continuous with the immature one-upmanship of their old activities. Meanwhile, Bruce’s hard physical labor in order to buy a board begins to convince his father that his son’s obsession with surfing is more than just a spiteful act of disobedience, even if he doesn’t approve of it. The father works in the sawmill, after all, and hard work is a language he understands.
Themes
The first time the boys surf with the new boards, Bruce experiences such ecstasy that he judges every subsequent moment of joy against it. Back on shore, he and Loonie meet the mysterious lone surfer they’d seen before. The man offers them a lift and lightheartedly ribs them about surfing without a wetsuit. He tells the boys they can store their surfboards under his house near the beach to avoid having to carry them on bikes every time. They decide not to this time, but they’re enchanted by the encounter.
The proper surfboards that the boys have worked hard to acquire finally deliver on the enthrallment and anticipation that they experienced when first watching the older boys surf. The interaction with and kind offer from the enigmatic older surfer compounds the sense that, for the boys, barriers are being broken down and they are gaining access to wonderful new realms.
Themes
