37 pages • 1 hour read
Peter HellerThe Dog Stars
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Book 1, Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Book 1, Chapter 4 Summary
Chapter 4 opens as Hig begins planting his garden, two weeks earlier than last year, with string beans, spinach, potato, tomatoes, and corn. It closes with Hig shooting two of the three men, including a blonde, dreadlocked man who tries to scare Hig by saying he overheard on the radio about “the A-rabs. They’re here. Or coming. Kill us all” (85). Hig finds this man in a trailer when Hig goes for a soda run.
Hig recalls final moments with Melissa and reveals how, at her request, and in her dying moments, while she suffers from “dysentery-like nausea and diarrhea and her lungs filling up like pneumonia” (61), a crying Hig suffocates Melissa with a pillow: “Her hand scratched at mine her eyes would not leave my face” (62).
Hig flies a patrol because Hig tells Bangley he plans a two-to-three-day hunting and fishing trip into the mountains in search of deer and elk. While flying, Hig recalls his friend Mike Ganger’s homemade plane, which Hig flew early on, after beginning to live at the airport. Hig would perform tricks in the plane, for something to do. Hig thinks about the beauty he sees flying, “that simple beauty was still bearable barely, and that if I lived moment to moment, garden to stove to the simple act of flying, I could have peace” (65). Yet Hig is fast to contrast this: “It was like I was living in doubleness, and the doubleness was the virulent insistence of life in its blues and greens laid over the scaling grays of death, and I could toggle one to the other” (65).
Chapter 4 also provides brief insight into Hig’ decisions nine years ago, before the widespread devastation: “In the final days when I decided I would have to bail out of the city fast, those are what I took out of my own cold shed in the backyard. A dirt crusted basket of seed packets and bucket of seed potatoes” (58).
Book 1, Chapter 5 Summary
Chapter 5 is narrated, for the most part, from Bangley’s perspective, as Bangley critiques Hig’s work at the soda trailer. Bangley gets steamed that Hig killed two men instead of maximizing the opportunity to learn more about the Arabs:
First mistake not working around to the side where you could shoot wide of the cargo and clear the back When the guy called back to his buddy behind the door and basically gave your coordinates. Sighted you in, Hig. […] Only thing I can figure for a move that bold is they knew they were dead anyway and thought to give this one desperate effort a chance (88).
Bangley adds: “We get the beta about A-rabs and what do you do? You plug the fucker […] First intel about a possible real visitor, I mean a visitor with some fucking muscle, a possible goddamn invasion, and you terminate the conversation” (90).
Hig realizes:
For Bangley, we only get so many fuckups before the jaws close, so the fight at the truck puts one more in my column which for better or worse is now his column. That’s what steams him the most […] I blew the air out of my cheeks. Thought: The mountains will be good […] Breathe some fresh air (91).
Note here how whatever camaraderie Hig felt the previous chapter in his and Bangley’s shared situation gives way, as Heller dials up narrative tension.
Book 1, Chapter 6 Summary
Hig hikes into the mountains and goes fishing, where he catches five fish and feeds Jasper one. Heller dedicates much of this chapter to memory, as well as naming trees and animals that have been lost and others which still remain. The main purpose of this chapter hovers around naming, creating a sense of place, though that place is lost. Hig notes:
Can get used to killing the way you can get used to a goat on the doorstep. Uncle Pete. With his bottle and cigarillos and stories. His living on a yacht with Aunt Louise […] The dead goats multiply. You can pull a goat off into the field, but a memory you can only haul into the sun and hope it desiccates (93).
Here, Hig digs into his sense of history, as Heller further develops the theme of lost places:
I think about the Plains tribes […] The Utes the Arapaho the Cheyenne. The Comanches came this far […] When I was a boy I read about the wars the raids between them and wondered why anyone would fight in a country this big (94).
This thinking leads Hig to wonder why he and Bangley are so divided: “Me versus him […] Everybody out for themselves, even to dealing death, and you come to a complete aloneness. You and the universe” (94).
As Hig hikes he recalls the area deer and elk and fish. Hig gets so moved he hugs a tree, then waxes nostalgic. But the nostalgia stems from a deep sense of loss, as Heller wants to investigate the intersections between past and present. Hig also expresses fear that with each trip he takes alone, Bangley might realize that Bangley can survive easier without Hig. Hig’s awareness of his own sentimentality causes Hig to think of his own weakness. Hig fishes for a couple hours and embraces the moment of peaceful clarity despite the devastation: “Darkness was already in the forest, it filled the little canyon like a slow tide, and the flames deepened it but the sky was still bright with the thinnest blue and I could see two stars” (102).
Book 1, Chapters 4-6 Analysis
Heller further develops themes of lost places, digs into Hig’ appreciation for simple beauty, and while heightening the dramatic tension between Hig and Bangley, also provides moments of comradeship between the two.
Chapter 4 presents a major question to be answered as the narrative progresses: who are the A-rabs? It also establishes a sense of routine, as Hig plants his annual garden. In addition it demonstrates Hig and Bangley’s mutual dependency on one another. It shows Hig and Bangley care about one another, evidenced by Hig’s patrol, before leaving for the fishing trip, which Hig says he does to assure Bangley’s safety during Hig’s absence.
The shift into Bangley’s perspective in Chapter 5 expands the space of the novel, providing a change in tone, though the terse quick pacing remains.
In Chapter 6, Heller digs into the book’s major themes. At play is the sense of lost place, competition for survival, and the simple lyric beauty of the names of America’s trees and animals. It’s clear Heller wants to create a post-apocalyptic situation in order to call attention to the beauty of contemporary America’s landscape.
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