Through the Tunnel Summary & Analysis

From the opening sentence, there are two initial thematic splits in the story: one between Jerry and his mother, another between the overcrowded beach and the rocky bay. As they walk to the beach and Jerry sees the rocky bay, there is both a physical and metaphorical fork in the path: the beach is tame and familiar, while the rocky bay is rugged and unknown.

As Jerry deliberates between following his mother’s arm, still bright white from a lack of exposure to the sun, and the rocky bay, he is also contemplating whether to stay with his comfortable routines or explore a new territory. As she wants to make her son happy but also protect him, Jerry’s mother is torn between letting him decide what he wants to do and wanting to keep him close at all times. An obedient son, Jerry doesn’t want to upset his mother, so he fights his growing curiosity and follows her to the beach. Yet the sight of the wild and rocky bay was so intriguing that he can’t stop thinking about what it might be like to swim and play there.

After only one day of sunbathing, Jerry’s mother’s arm has noticeably reddened, which demonstrates how foreign the climate and geography are for these British tourists. Jerry is tempted again on this second day to follow his mother out of a guilty sense of duty but ultimately can’t contain his desire to explore. His mother again wants to protect him from the potential threats of the “wild-looking place” but also wants to grant him some degree of independence as he gets older. As a kind of compromise for herself, telling him to come back to the sunbathing beach when he is done with the rocky bay is a way of satisfying both of her conflicting instincts.

As an only child, Jerry feels some responsibility for looking after his widowed mother, just as she feels the need to keep him safe at all times. This need to care for his mother’s well-being is shown when he doesn’t immediately run down to explore on his own, but watches after her first.

Excited to explore on his own, but still feeling the need to make sure that his mother is doing well without him nearby, Jerry is compelled to check in on her from a distance. The local older boys at the rocky bay show that what seemed wild to him at first is familiar to the locals. Jerry badly wants to be a part of their group, and can seemingly swim as well as they can, yet his inability to speak their language makes him not only inferior to them in age and stature, but in ability. Nevertheless, the boys represent an attainable form of maturity for Jerry, even if they want nothing to do with him.

The biggest boy, and the apparent leader of the group, is the first to attempt the daring feat of swimming through the underwater tunnel, which Jerry can’t see. Shocked by this novel trick, and still desperate to be accepted into their group, he dives after them. Yet, as he is unsure of what they are doing, he doesn’t know where to swim and his body is unaccustomed to this new physical challenge. Unable to communicate with the boys, he will have to teach himself if he hopes to be able to do as they do.

As a last effort at earning the older boys’ respect, Jerry frantically moves about to get a laugh from them and then, not knowing their native language, tries speaking a few phrases in French. Choosing to ignore him altogether instead, they escape from his childish behavior by diving through the tunnel again, which they know he is unable to do. Paying closer attention this time, he counts the seconds they are underwater and is surprised at their advanced skill at holding breath. With this, Jerry has been definitively rejected from their small community, by dint of a gap in physical ability as well as their disdain for him as an outsider.

Though he understands that he may never befriend the group of boys, Jerry still wants to figure out the mystery of swimming through this tunnel. As an outsider to the area, he has to use goggles to see where the boys already know to swim, and a heavy rock to reach a depth they have no trouble diving to. Using these tools, he begins to slowly teach himself how to approximate what the boys did.

In this early stage of exploring both the tunnel and his newfound freedom, Jerry still has a rather childish imagination, as when he assumes an underwater plant could be a threatening octopus. Pushing through these fears, though, Jerry still wants nothing more than to accomplish exactly what the older boys could perform with ease.

Unable to physically fit into the hole yet, Jerry pieces together what he’ll need to do if he wants to safely swim into the unknown darkness of the tunnel. Holding his breath for long periods of time, he determines, is necessary for him to navigate this natural environment. Thus, growth and learning are integral pieces of the process of maturation.

After only a day of not being under his mother’s close care, Jerry is now significantly less concerned with being an obedient son. He slowly becomes obsessed with his new task of getting through the tunnel. Jerry’s mother notices his nosebleeds but doesn’t know what he is doing when he is at the rocky bay, highlighting that part of the process of maturation, for Jerry, is this growing distance between mother and child.

As he continues to improve his abilities to hold his breath, Jerry’s health begins to deteriorate, which partly justifies his mother’s earlier worries about him being alone. Though he had a small taste of independence and freedom during his previous days at the rocky bay, Jerry quickly reverts to a more child-like mode when his mother makes him go to the overcrowded beach. While there, he finally understands that he has outgrown the doting care of his mother and has grown to have more autonomy than ever before.

Eager to regain what he lost the day before (i.e., both his sense of autonomy and his physical training regimen), Jerry re-establishes his base at the rocky bay. His increased ability to hold his breath has proved that there is something tangible to be earned from his otherwise hard-to-describe feeling of growing independence. By studiously surveying the details of the tunnel, Jerry is making a place that was once quite foreign to him into one that is quite familiar. 

Until the point when his mother set an end-date to their vacation, all of Jerry’s physical accomplishments were somewhat abstract. Once there is a determined end in sight, though, he realizes that he needs to finally put into practice all that he had been training for thus far. He loses confidence again when he gets his worst nosebleed, but is still determined to reach his goal.

As determined as he is to fulfill his self-determined rite of passage of swimming through the tunnel, Jerry’s nervousness and shaky confidence make him seem to revert, at least partially, to his earlier child-like state of fear when he first began exploring the tunnel. Just as he imagined an octopus in that earlier episode, he imagines it again here. As he feels close to the tunnel’s end, he regains his confidence, only to lose it yet again when he realizes that he’s only partway through the tunnel. In this way, the natural world and its many surprises mirror Jerry’s internal state with its many ups and downs.

Though Jerry ultimately achieves his goal of swimming through the tunnel, which had been in his sights for several days, he also physically suffers a great deal in the process, This pain is perhaps the ultimate mark of Jerry’s new, hard-won endurance and general sense of confidence, as though the only way he can truly earn his maturity is through these physical setbacks.

By finally completing his rite of passage and emerging into a newfound sense of maturity, Jerry loses the desire to compare himself to the group of older boys. What began as a campaign to prove himself to others ends as an affirmation of the importance of proving oneself to oneself, first and foremost.

Unaware of what Jerry had been doing out of her sight at the rocky bay, his mother is only able to notice the injuries that he sustained while swimming through the tunnel. Jerry’s maturity, confidence and autonomy are all concealed away from her view, accessible only to Jerry himself. Jerry’s loss of interest in visiting the bay shows that the obstacle it represented for him no longer looms so large in his mind, having proven himself capable of rising to a challenge through determination, perseverance, and hard work.