45 pages • 1 hour read
Kawai Strong WashburnSharks In The Time Of Saviors
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaPart 2, Chapters 14-17Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “Ascension”
Chapter 14 Summary: “Dean, 2008, Spokane”
Dean receives an unexpected call from Nainoa, who is crying on the phone. When Dean asks his brother what is wrong, Noa responds, “I made a mistake” (171). Noa then tells Dean about the pregnant woman’s death and his failed attempt to save her and the baby. Noa tells Dean that he plans to go home to Hawai‘i. He asks if Dean believes in destiny, and Dean responds that he does not.
Dean expresses regret about the way he handled Noa’s call: “You take me back to that call now, I’d do it the right way. I’d be the man I was supposed to be, not the boy I was” (173).
Chapter 15 Summary: “Nainoa, 2008, Kalihi”
Nainoa returns home to Hawai‘i. He spends time going out to dinner with his parents and doing tourist things, such as visiting the USS Arizona Memorial. His girlfriend Khadeja calls him repeatedly, but he does not return her calls.
Nainoa tells his mother that he hates what’s inside of him, alluding to his healing gift. Malia tells him he has a gift that could help many people. She asks why he returned to Hawai‘i. Noa responds, “It just felt right” (177). His mother tells him that the feeling he has “is something speaking” and that he should listen to it (177).
After the conversation with his mother, Nainoa immerses himself in the natural wonders of the island: “I leave the concrete parts of the land, I find the parks and the valleys and the oceans [...] all the hidden places I knew about as a teenager” (177). He swims in the ocean and encounters sharks. He touches their bodies, and they do not attack him. As he strokes the sharks, he has a vision about Waipi‘o Valley.
Chapter 16 Summary: “Malia, 2008, Kalihi”
Malia reflects on her spiritual beliefs: “There are gods that we choose and gods that we can’t avoid; there are gods that we pray to and gods that prey on us” (180). She laments how the god of money has destroyed local Hawaiian culture: “When our language, ‘Olelo Hawai‘i, was outlawed, so our gods went, so prayers went, so ideas went, so the island went” (181).
She admits to encouraging Nainoa to visit Waipi‘o Valley, having believed it was what he needed to do: “I trusted in what you were feeling, and that to follow that feeling would hopefully bring forth that which was inside you” (182).
Chapter 17 Summary: “Nainoa, 2008, Waipi‘o Valley”
Nainoa hikes in the Waipi‘o and Waimanu valleys on the Big Island. He believes the outing will help him find the direction he needs to go in life. He comes to a shack and meets a German couple. He plays the ukulele for them, and they feed him breakfast.
He continues his journey, feeling at peace. He thinks, “This is where I should have been all along, I should have stayed in the islands, worked harder to listen” (190). He comes to a clearing and then to a “lookout edge” where the ground slopes down. He is standing “far above the valley floor” when the ground shifts under him (191). As he falls from the cliff, he feels his femur snap: “I’m spinning, weightless again, the air rushes, oh wait, oh wait—” (191).
Part 2, Chapters 14-17 Analysis
The interaction between Dean and Nainoa in Chapter 14 reveals that despite the sibling rivalry, Nainoa reaches out to his older brother in a time of crisis, and Dean loves and wants to protect Nainoa. Looking back on the call from a time after Noa’s death, Dean regrets that he failed to do more to help his brother: “You take me back to that call now, I’d do it the right way” (173). In fact, in these chapters, the sibling rivalry between the two brothers is beginning to resolve.
In Chapter 16, Malia reflects on life in the islands as a battle of gods. She has sided with the ancient Hawaiian gods, whom she sees as linked to the land and its natural gifts, over the gods of money and tourism. Notably, in this section the influence of her beliefs on Nainoa emerges clearly.
When Nainoa returns to Hawai‘i, he searches for himself. In seeking his identity, he turns to nature, the realm of Malia’s gods: “I let green and blue and gold songs scatter around me in the dawn and dusk in wild places” (177). He returns to the natural vistas of his childhood, a nostalgic refuge that Dean and Kaui also turn to during crisis moments.
The shark motif resurfaces at the end of Chapter 15 when Nainoa goes swimming in the ocean and encounters sharks, who again circle him without attacking. In fact, he touches their bodies as they pass him in the water. Like the incident at the beginning of the novel, the shark encounter seems to have a magical effect on Nainoa and gives him a new sense of purpose: “My eyes are open, the sharks are gone. [...] but I know where I have to go, where it all began of course, the valley” (179).
Nature comes to symbolize a more innocent, easier understood world for the Flores siblings. When Nainoa falls from the cliff in the Waipi‘o Valley, his death fulfills the destiny he mentioned in his phone call to Dean, and he ascends to heaven to join the gods.
