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Chapter 17
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Island of the Blue Dolphins, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Natural World
Solitude
Friendship
Gender Roles and Survival
Colonialism, Violence, and Indigenous Culture
Summary
Analysis
Thanks to the heavy rains in the spring, sand flowers, yuccas, lupins, and comuls all bloom profusely. Many kinds of birds, including hummingbirds and blue jays, come to the island. One bird, with a yellow body and bright red head, is one that Karana hasn’t seen before. A pair of these birds nests near her house. Karana leaves abalone for the parents to feed their two babies. The babies are gray and ugly, but Karana takes them from the nest and keeps them in a cage. Eventually they become just as beautiful as their parents, and they sing the same sweet song.
As Karana describes the various flowers and birds that abound on the island in the spring, her admiration of the natural world shines through. Everything coming to life in the spring suggests to her that life will continue and will even be beautiful, regardless of her solitary plight. Capturing the birds shows Karana that she can continue to make friends and surround herself with other beings, even if she’s the only human on the island.
Themes
When the birds grow too big for the cage, Karana clips their wings and lets them loose inside the house. They learn to take food from her hand. When their wings grow out again, Karana clips them and lets the birds into the yard. This time, when the birds’ wings grow, Karana doesn’t cut them. The birds only go as far as the ravine, and always return to sleep and beg for food. Karana calls the larger one Tainor after a boy she loved and the small one Lurai, the name Karana sometimes wishes was hers.
Because Karana understands something of bird psychology, she’s able to successfully tame Tainor and Lurai and turn them into pets—without having to keep them caged all the time. Tainor’s name in particular allows Karana to pay homage to her tribe, which shows that she still hasn’t forgotten her former friends and neighbors. In fact, she’s trying to recreate that community with her new animal friends.
Themes
Karana makes another yucca skirt as she’s taming the birds. She makes a sealskin belt for it and also sealskin sandals to protect her feet from the hot sand—or just to feel dressed up. Karana often puts on her skirt and sandals and walks the cliffs with Rontu. Sometimes, she makes a flower crown to wear. All the women in the tribe singed their hair short after the Aleuts killed the men at Coral Cove. Karana had done this too, but now, her hair comes to her waist. Karana also makes a flower wreath for Rontu’s neck, though he doesn’t like it. They walk the cliffs, staring at the sea. They’re happy, though the white men’s ship doesn’t return. Everything smells like flowers, and birds sing.
At this point in the novel, Karana hasn’t given much thought to whether or not she should perform tasks that were formerly done only by men—now, they’re just tasks she must do to survive. But she shows here that performing those tasks doesn’t mean she’s given up on being feminine; indeed, the exact opposite seems true. Karana can make a yucca skirt and flower crown—feminine tasks—in addition to, presumably, killing a seal (a masculine task) to make the belt and sandals. And noting that her hair has grown so long suggests that she’s healing and moving on from the trauma of seeing the tribesmen being murdered.
Themes
