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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
The island is surrounded on three sides by kelp beds, which extend into the sea about a league. The Aleuts hunt otter in the kelp every day. From the cliffs, Karana watches their canoes skim through the water and spears fly at the otter. In the evenings, two men skin the otter on the beach. Every morning, the beach is covered in carcasses and the waves are bloody. Many villagers count the dead otter every night and think of how many beads they’ll get in return. But Karana is angry—the otter are her friends, and it’s more fun to watch them play than wear beads. One day, when she tells her father this, he laughs at her and insists that the otter will return to the kelp beds once the Aleuts leave in a week or so.
Even if Karana’s entire tribe is in tune with the natural world, Karana seems even more in tune than the others. Unlike, say, her father, she’s unwilling to see the otter as currency. To her, they’re friends, and the beads she’ll get in return for their bodies are meaningless. But describing the kelp beds and all the dead otter situates the Island of the Blue Dolphins as a place rich in these natural resources. And this makes it a prime target for colonizing forces, like the Aleuts and their Russian captain.
Themes
Karana knows her father believes the Aleuts will leave soon—he sent young men to build a canoe out of driftwood, which means those men are always on the beach to make sure the Aleuts don’t try to leave without paying. Everyone is afraid Captain Orlov will try to leave without paying, so they keep close watch. They notice the Aleut woman cleaning her aprons and the hunters shift to skinning rather than killing. The villagers wonder if Captain Orlov will pay, or if they’ll have to fight. Karana’s father stays silent, but he works on a new spear every night.
Once again, given how poorly things went last time, the tribe’s distrust of the Aleuts and Captain Orlov make perfect sense. At this point, though, it’s not easy to tell whether Karana’s father is right to be so suspicious of Captain Orlov. At the same time, this passage also shows how tasks get split up along gender lines in Karana’s tribe. It’s a task for young men, Karana implies, to build canoes.
Themes
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