Previous
Porourangi
Jeff is Rawiri’s roommate and best friend while Rawiri is living in Sydney, Australia. When Jeff’s parents, Clara and Tom, call him back to the family plantation in Papua New Guinea, Rawiri joins them for two years. Jeff’s friendship helps Rawiri mature and make sense of his own identity, but race ultimately drives them apart. Most notably, Jeff runs over one of the native men who work on his plantation, and then he chooses to flee the scene with his parents instead of staying to help the man with Rawiri. This shows Rawiri that white settler colonialism depends on treating native people as subhuman, and that he and Jeff will always be on opposite sides of this divide.
Jeff Quotes in The Whale Rider
The The Whale Rider quotes below are all either spoken by Jeff or refer to Jeff. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Autumn: Chapter 11
Quotes
In many respects the parallels with the Maori in New Zealand were very close, except that we didn’t have to advance as many years in one lifetime. However, our journey was possibly more difficult because it had to be undertaken within European terms of acceptability. We were a minority and much of our progress was dependent on European goodwill. And there was no doubt that in New Zealand, just as in Papua New Guinea, our nationalism was also galvanizing the people to become one Maori nation.
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire The Whale Rider LitChart as a printable PDF.
Jeff Quotes in The Whale Rider
The The Whale Rider quotes below are all either spoken by Jeff or refer to Jeff. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Autumn: Chapter 11
Quotes
In many respects the parallels with the Maori in New Zealand were very close, except that we didn’t have to advance as many years in one lifetime. However, our journey was possibly more difficult because it had to be undertaken within European terms of acceptability. We were a minority and much of our progress was dependent on European goodwill. And there was no doubt that in New Zealand, just as in Papua New Guinea, our nationalism was also galvanizing the people to become one Maori nation.
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
