Brewer Surfboard Symbol Analysis

The Brewer surfboard that Sando gives to Bruce embodies Bruce’s struggle to prove his worth to himself as well as to Loonie and Sando. The first time Sando takes Bruce to surf Old Smoky, he packs three classic Brewer surfboards—“huge, beautiful things”—but Loonie refuses to go along because of his broken arm. Loonie’s unused Brewer highlights by contrast the growing one-on-one bond Bruce feels with Sando, symbolized by Sando letting him use the illustrious board. At this stage, however, Bruce “could barely carry” the board, suggesting his unpreparedness for the dangerous waves to which Sando is introducing him. He indeed gets dangerously slammed in Old Smoky, but the effort made on the Brewer fills him with pride.

Later on, Sando, for his part, “cranked the Brewer with a strength [Bruce] knew was beyond [him]” in the Nautilus, thereby convincing Bruce to sit out the wave. His refusal to use his Brewer alongside Loonie and Sando, who deploy them with reckless glee, shifts the balance in their triangular relationship to place Bruce on the outside of a bond between the other two. The surfboard now represents a fraternity from which he feels excluded. Loonie and Sando return to the Nautilus one day during a storm without telling Bruce, and Bruce angrily reacts by snagging the third Brewer from Sando’s house and going to surf Old Smoky alone—an even more reckless feat. Having staked all his self-worth on this death-defying stunt, Bruce loses the Brewer to the waves in the process, suggesting his collapse of confidence and control. Yet word of his daredevil attempt is enough to win Sando’s admiration, and when a fisherman recovers the Brewer from the sea, Sando drops it off at Bruce’s house. His mother tells him that the man who dropped it off “[s]aid you’d earned it.”

Ultimately, however, Bruce outgrows this need to prove himself and “earn” other’s approval, as well as his own, through extreme acts of daring: the Brewer sits in his father’s shed from that day forward, never being ridden or much thought of again. What was once the ultimate symbol of Bruce’s attainment and pride becomes just a relic of an outgrown insecurity.