Hatchet Social Sensitivity

Hatchet Social Sensitivity

Brian's physical ordeal is realistically described. He experiences injury, fright, and danger. He witnesses the death of the pilot. He is almost killed several times. He learns to eat foods that normally would disgust him. Paulsen does not write in a gratuitously gruesome detail about these matters, but he does not shy away from mentioning the hard, unpleasant truths of surviving without the amenities and protections of civilized life.

Brian's emotional ordeal is also realistically described. The thought of his parents' recent divorce haunts him and evokes conflicting feelings in him. He is alternately angry and confused; he sometimes judges them harshly and blames them for beginning the chain of events that led him to being lost.

Brian's awareness of the Secret, his mother's relationship with the "blond hair man," causes him special grief.

The fact that he witnessed his mother and lover in...
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