39 pages • 1 hour read
Lauren TarshisI Survived the Joplin Tornado, 2011
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2015A 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 8-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 8 Summary: “5:00 p.m., Columbus, Kansas”
After following the storm for a few miles, Dr. Gage pulls the car over. He and Dex stand by a cornfield and regard the thickening, darkening cloud, which Dr. Gage calls “a perfect cumulonimbus cloud,” the kind that creates tornadoes (42). Though he suspects the cloud is “losing strength,” he invites Dex to shoot the sound pods into the sky (42). Dex imagines how excited Jeremy would be if he were here and is momentarily overcome with worry for his brother, but just then, bolts of lightning tear open the cloud, which has turned black and billowing. Dex feels the electricity in the air. Realizing the storm is dangerous, Dr. Gage grabs Dex to get them away from the lightning, which hits a nearby tree, causing it to explode. Rain pours down, followed by hail. Dr. Gage orders Dex to cover his head, but a huge hailstone crashes into him. He falls to the ground.
Chapter 9 Summary
Dr. Gage helps Dex back to his car, which now has a cracked windshield, and gives him an ice pack for the lump on his head. After the hail stops, Dr. Gage retrieves a large hailstone as a “souvenir” for Dex (48). He notes that it smells like mint and imagines showing it to his friends at school the next day. Consulting his radar map, Dr. Gage observes two supercell storms headed in their direction and decides the weather is too dangerous; they should return to Joplin. Spooked by the lightning, Dex is secretly relieved.
On the return trip, Dr. Gage entertains Dex with funny stories about his father, but Dex notices that he seems concerned about something behind them: “an enormous gray cloud moving very quickly toward them” (50). Dex asks if it is a supercell, and Dr. Gage is unsure. He turns the car around and drives cautiously toward it. Lightning flashes inside the cloud, and in the “split second of brightness,” they see a massive tornado inside it, heading straight for Joplin (51).
Chapter 10 Summary
Dr. Gage turns the car around, racing away from the tornado. He reports the sighting to 911, and the warning sirens go off. Reflecting that the tornado is headed toward “some of the most crowded parts of the city,” Dex wonders if anyone will pay attention to the sirens (52). Dr. Gage gives Dex the phone to call his parents, but his calls do not go through. Rain pours down, and the wind picks up. Dex notices pink dots on the radar map, which Dr. Gage admits reflect debris—houses, buildings, and cars “that had been sucked thousands of feet into the sky” (55). Dex’s eyes fill with tears; he is watching his city be “torn to pieces” (55). Dr. Gage gets a call through to Jimmy and Sara, who are behind the tornado. Just then, a telephone pole falls in front of them, and Dr. Gage breaks suddenly, sending the car spinning into a chain-link fence. As chunks of a roof and a stop sign swirl around and into them, Dr. Gage tries to back up the car but can’t get it free of the fence. Dex’s ears pop, and he hears a roaring sound.
Chapter 11 Summary
Dr. Gage and Dex were “caught in the evil, swirling darkness” of the tornado (59). He watches it tear apart a garage, sucking pieces into the sky. The stench “of rotting earth and gas” fills his nose and throat (60). Dex recalls the rules drilled into him at school but knows it would be futile to leave the SUV. A car window shatters, and the car fills with glass, dirt, rocks, and wood. The wind sucks Dex out of his seat toward the window, but Dr. Gage grabs him and orders him to stay down. Dex curls into a ball under the dashboard while the tornado roars “like a beast whose bloody kill had been snatched away” (61). The car flips over again and again. Dex closes his eyes and prays. He hears an explosion, sees a blinding light, “and then nothing” (63).
Chapters 8-11 Analysis
The chapters in this section lead to the climax of the plot: Dex and Dr. Gage being caught in and injured by the tornado. After following the storm to Kansas, Dex has an opportunity to participate in Dr. Gage’s research by shooting the sound pods into the sky, but as foreshadowed earlier in the novel, the weather turns dangerous quickly and unexpectedly, leading to Dex being hit in the head by a hailstone as he and Dr. Gage rush back to the car. The escalation of severity leads Dr. Gage to cut their chase short, but returning to Joplin does not prevent them from being caught by the storm since it has changed direction and is headed for the city. Dex anticipates what will transpire, which is that the tornado will devastate the city.
The details of Dex and Dr. Gage’s experience in the tornado’s grip are rendered dramatically, crafting a vivid picture of tornadoes’ violence and danger, which were previously described in clinical terms. The author uses figurative language associating the tornado with predatory animals, as if it has a will of its own, emphasizing humans’ inability to control nature. The potential futility of sirens and the tornado preparedness drills that Dex learned at school heighten the lack of human control, emphasizing how The Limits of Human Knowledge relate to vulnerability and a person’s ability to keep themselves safe. Because tornadoes’ paths cannot be predicted with a high degree of accuracy, sirens are frequently employed, leading to uncertainty about the degree of threat. Similarly, in his school’s tornado drills, Dex learned that the worst place to be during a tornado is outside, but since it hit unexpectedly, he is stuck in the SUV. Tarshis connects this theme to The Need for Resilience and Resourcefulness; because it is not always possible to avoid danger through knowledge and preparation, it is important for Dex to have other resources to rely on to keep himself safe. The ability to persevere and look for solutions even in the midst of crisis is what allows Dex to navigate safely through the storm, and to ultimately save Dr. Gage in the following chapters.
Chapter 11 ends on a cliffhanger with the implication that Dex has been knocked out by the increasingly violent effects of the tornado. The SUV’s windows have been shattered, filling the interior with debris, broken glass, and dirt. Though the SUV is somewhat tethered by being tangled in the chain link fence, it flips over repeatedly. Clinical descriptions and lived experiences come together in this section as Dex and Dr. Gage themselves become trapped in the debris that earlier appeared as pink dots on a screen.
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By Lauren Tarshis
