45 pages • 1 hour read
Joseph BruchacSkeleton Man
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2001A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 5-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “Eat and Grow Fat”
Molly states that although the house is dark and isolated, it is not that spooky. However, she has the feeling that someone is always watching her. She also thinks that her great-uncle is odd; he is rarely at home when she gets back from school, and he leaves food in the refrigerator for her that she always dumps into the garbage disposal.
Instead of watching television or videos, Molly chooses to do her homework or read a book. Now, after getting ready for bed, she finishes her homework easily and turns to a book that Ms. Shabbas has recommended. When she gets tired, she goes to sleep with the light on. Immediately, she returns to her dream from the night before. In this dream, she brings her great-uncle a partridge to eat and lies, telling him that she did not find a rabbit. Her great-uncle grabs her arm, squeezes it, and announces that she is too thin. He says, “You must eat more, my niece. Eat and grow fat for me” (43). She awakens suddenly and realizes that her room is very similar to the cave of her dream; she also realizes that the sounds she hears her great-uncle making resemble the sounds that the Skeleton Man makes when he walks.
Chapter 6 Summary: “No Pictures”
Molly notices that there are no photos or mirrors in the house. She recalls that although her great-uncle looked human when he first picked her up, his appearance has changed since then, and he never shows her his face. Once, when Molly caught a glimpse of his face, “[i]t seemed as if the flesh was falling off his bones” (45). His hands also are very strange; they are thin and white and feature claw-like fingers.
Molly still misses her parents. Her father told her that because she has vivid dreams, she has an inherited gift and can intuitively know when people are truly gone for good. Therefore, she believes that if her parents were truly dead, they would communicate with her through her dreams. It has now been several days since her parent’s disappearance, and she considers running away. However, she also has a strong intuition that if she is ever going to see her parents again, she must be at this house. She believes that her great-uncle has something to do with her parents’ disappearance, and she knows that she must trust her dreams.
Chapter 7 Summary: “The Counselor”
In the morning, Molly decides to talk to the school counselor. When she tells Ms. Shabbas that her great-uncle locks her in at night, her teacher immediately takes her to the counselor, Mrs. Rudder. The counselor is rude and tries to avoid talking to Molly, but Ms. Shabbas is insistent. As Molly shares her story, Mrs. Rudder clearly believes that Molly is wasting her time. Molly wants to describe all the ways that her great-uncle makes her afraid, but although she wants to talk about her dreams, she knows that Mrs. Rudder will not believe her. So instead, she only says that he locks her in her room every night.
Mrs. Rudder and Mr. Wintergreen from Child Welfare take Molly for a visit with her great-uncle. However, because her great-uncle has had an hour to prepare, he appears fully human when they arrive. In addition, he has changed the door to Molly’s bedroom so that there is no lock on it. He tells the adults that Molly has been under a lot of pressure. Mrs. Rudder and Mr. Wintergreen dismiss Molly’s fears as mere anxiety. After they leave, Molly’s great-uncle tells her to eat her dinner. Then he goes upstairs and reinstalls the lock on her door.
Chapter 8 Summary: “The Girl in the Story”
In her room that night, Molly knows that he will have to watch her great-uncle carefully because he now knows how she feels about him. She tries to cheer herself up by recalling the stories her father used to tell, but this only reminds her of how much she misses her parents.
She falls asleep and finds herself in a dream forest. She sees two figures: the rabbit and herself. The other Molly is dressed in deerskin, and she appears to be a Mohawk. Molly suddenly becomes one with the dream-Molly and speaks with the rabbit. He tells her that she is not safe, but that she must be very brave. Molly becomes angry with the rabbit. She already knows that she is unsafe. The rabbit tells her that her parents “are buried, but not dead” (62).
Molly suddenly awakens from the dream but does not understand what the phrase “buried but not dead” (62) might mean.
Chapters 5-8 Analysis
As Molly’s understanding of her predicament deepens, Bruchac uses her reactions to emphasize The Courage and Resilience of Young People¸ for he consistently describes Molly as a resourceful and intelligent person who endures her parents’ disappearance and her own subsequent move to the house of her sinister great-uncle with strength and clear-headedness. Although she is frightened and knows that something is terribly wrong, she does not panic. Instead, she analyzes her situation in order to determine how she can best keep herself safe. While her facility with her homework assignments implies that she is “book smart,” she is also revealed to have a considerable degree of common sense. For example, although she considers herself to be “melodramatic,” she is sensible enough to seek practical solutions to her dilemma by enlisting the help of her compassionate and supportive teacher, Ms. Shabbas. Because Ms. Shabbas is creative and imaginative, she notices that something is wrong with Molly and tries to help, revealing herself to be a trustworthy figure in Molly’s life. However, in accordance with the common trope of requiring YA protagonists to solve their problems alone, Bruchac engineers a situation in which Ms. Shabbas’s attempts to help Molly are largely unsuccessful. From a storytelling perspective, this clears the path to allow Molly to pursue less conventional solutions—such as following the advice of her dreams—in order to solve the mystery of her parents’ disappearance.
In many ways, Ms. Shabbas acts as a foil to the far less trustworthy characters of Mrs. Rudder and Mr. Wintergreen, who fail to protect Molly from the predations of her supposed great-uncle. For example, when confronted with Molly’s insistence that her great-uncle is locking her away in the room, Mrs. Rudder acts dismissively toward Molly rather than taking her seriously, and Bruchac’s descriptions use vivid imagery to emphasize the woman’s contemptuous nature. As Molly states, “Mrs. Rudder has this way of looking down at people that makes them feel as if they’re being shrunk down under a microscope” (51). Thus, without even speaking, Mrs. Rudder belittles Molly and dismisses her very real concerns. Because Mrs. Rudder and Mr. Wintergreen are so unobservant that they fail to see anything amiss when visiting Molly’s great-uncle, they represent the unhelpful adult world that collectively misunderstands and dismisses the problems of young people, leaving them to fend for themselves. Additionally, they do not notice how strange Molly’s great-uncle appears and dismiss Molly’s fear and do not question why Molly’s parents have disappeared. Within this scene, Bruchac has inserted the unspoken implication that non-Indigenous adults hold unfair biases and outright prejudices toward Indigenous parents; Mrs. Rudder and Mr. Wintergreen’s dismissive reactions to a perilous situation serve to emphasize this prejudice.
Significantly, Bruchac uses visceral descriptions of visual, auditory, and tactile experiences in order to place the everyday surroundings of Molly’s world within an ominously fantastical framework. This technique implies that when it comes to her supposed great-uncle, nothing is as it seems, and her dreams are in fact far more accurate than the trappings of ordinary reality. In her dreams, Molly sees her great-uncle’s fingers as “long and hairy,” and “his fingernails are thick and sharp, more like claws” (42), and she also hears the cracking of bones as he eats a dead bird. Similarly, his nails are described as being “red with blood” (43), and even when she is fully awake, Molly perceives her room as being “bare and cold as the chamber of a cave” (43). If this were not enough to draw a direct correlation between her great-uncle and the Mohawk tale at the beginning of the novel, the narrative also reveals that the sound of the door locking reminds her of skeleton bones. These vivid details engage all of the human senses to create a mood of terror and foreshadow the fact that the treacherous Skeleton Man has Molly within his grasp.
This section of the novel also places particular emphasis upon the importance of Gaining Insight Through Dreams and Intuition, for with the lack of support from adult authority figures in her life, Molly must rely upon more fantastical sources for help. For this reason, Bruchac emphasizes Molly’s feelings and hunches. Rather than explaining away or ignoring her intuition, she acts on it in order to protect herself from the dangers that only she can perceive. For example, as she analyzes the detrimental effects of the food that her great-uncle left for her, she realizes that he is drugging her. Trusting this feeling, she dumps the food, and her choice illustrates her willingness to trust her instincts and take immediate action. In addition, Molly experiences her first “aware dream,” and Molly relies on her parents’ past instruction when she takes her dream seriously and respects The Importance of Cultural Heritage and Traditional Wisdom. Because of what her father has taught her, she accepts the idea that dreams can be a vital source of information that is unavailable to the waking mind. When Molly acts on the advice of a rabbit she meets in a dream, this choice illustrates the fact that she functions both logically and intuitively.
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By Joseph Bruchac
