81 pages • 2 hours read
Paolo BacigalupiShip Breaker
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2010A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 1-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
In a dystopian future where climate change has melted the polar ice caps, coastlines have drastically changed and major coastal cities are underwater. The population on the Gulf Coast of the US has broken into clans that survive by scavenging wire and metals from the rusted hulks of wrecked tankers and freighters. Nailer, a 15-year-old member of a light crew on Bright Sands, crawls through a service passage on a grounded oil tanker, pulling copper wiring from the walls. The light crews—those scavengers who take only the lighter salvage such as wiring and steel clips from the ships—must be small enough to burrow through the narrow service ducts, and Nailer worries about how he will survive once he is too big to do the job. The work is hot and dangerous, and the only protection he has against the toxic dust is his filter mask, which doesn’t fit and is falling apart.
Once Nailer pulls his quota of copper wiring, he crawls to the open deck, where swarms of people tear the tanker apart for salvage, looking like an “ant’s nest of activity” (5). With fellow crewmember Sloth, Nailer moves the spool of wire to the lower deck, where the rest of the crew waits to strip the insulation from it. Before they hit the lower deck, Nailer sees one of the new clipper ships in the distance; white, clean, and powered by high-altitude parasails that harness the jet streams, the clipper ship reminds Nailer that there are places in the world that are safe, unlike his violent stretch of beach.
Nailer and Sloth join the remainder of the crew—Boss Girl Pima, Pearly, Moon-Girl, and Tick-Tock—in stripping the insulation. Pima reprimands Nailer for taking so long in the ship. Nailer reminds Pima that the copper is deep inside the tanker, but Sloth jumps in to tell Pima that she (Sloth) is smaller and smarter than Nailer and can take his place in the ducts. Typically, once kids are too large to fit in the ducts, they are reduced to begging on the beach unless they can bulk up enough to work the heavy crew, tearing off the iron and pipes. Pima is dangerously close to being too big for light crew, and Nailer also worries about losing his place, even though genetically Nailer stands a chance to be like his father, Richard Lopez: small and fast.
Bapi, the crew boss, joins them and announces that a storm is blowing in; they must pull the rest of the wire immediately. When Nailer shows reluctance, Bapi tells him that he is like his father—lazy, waiting to have a “Lucky Strike” so he will never have to work again. Nailer is angry, but Pima reminds him that defending his father, who is violent and has a drug addiction, isn’t worth it. Nailer swallows his anger and assures Bapi that he will retrieve the scavenge.
Chapter 2 Summary
Nailer returns to the innards of the tanker and delves farther than he’s ever been. He finds a rich supply of copper wire, but his LED paint patch, which lights the way, is wearing out and he can barely see. While crawling through the duct, he remembers Jackson Boy, a child who got lost in the ducts of a ship. Jackson Boy banged on the sides of the ship for three days, but the searchers were unable to locate him. A year later heavy crews found Jackson Boy’s body, mummified and rat-eaten, in a double hull.
Nailer, imagining what it would be like to get stuck like Jackson Boy, feels the sides of the duct tightening around him. Panicked, he decides to return to the deck. Crawling down the dark passage, he hears a scraping noise and thinks it might be Jackson Boy’s ghost. He squirms faster down the duct but gets tangled in his wire. As he frantically kicks the wire off his legs, the duct begins to groan under his weight and then collapses underneath him; he desperately grabs a scavenged wire, but it tears loose. His final thought is that he doesn’t want to be another Jackson Boy; then he plunges into liquid.
Chapter 3 Summary
Nailer sinks through a “warm, reeking liquid” (22), unable to swim to the surface even though he is an excellent swimmer. His hand finally tangles in a piece of copper wire, and he realizes that the liquid is oil. Knowing that it is impossible to swim in oil due to its density, Nailer wraps the piece of wiring around his hand and hauls himself to the surface. Tearing off his filter mask to wipe the oil out of his eyes, he realizes that he is in utter darkness, trapped in an undiscovered oil reservoir. He hooks his arms through the tangles in the wiring as the duct overhead groans at the added weight. At some point the duct will give way and sink him again. He yells for Pima and realizes from the echoes that the oil reservoir is very small.
Nailer stretches out his toes until he finds a small pipe attached to the walls. He lunges for the pipe, and the duct overhead gives way, sealing off escape. Clinging to the wall, he muses on his “Lucky Strike”: While he may have found enough oil to make him rich, he will also probably drown in it. On Bright Sands, a Lucky Strike means finding a priceless amount of scavenge, and only one man has done so to date. The man, who renamed himself Lucky Strike after his fortunes changed, found undiscovered oil in a tanker and smuggled it out himself, making enough money to buy out his indenture and set himself up as a labor broker for the heavy crews. Nailer knows his discovery holds far more wealth than the original Lucky Strike, but he has no way to tell his crew what he’s found.
Soon he hears Sloth calling his name. He yells for Sloth and explains his predicament. Sloth refuses to bring him rope, considering letting him die so she can have her own Lucky Strike. He reminds her that they are crew and swore a blood oath; she has an obligation to cover his back. In answer, she throws down a water bottle and package of food from Pima and disappears.
Rationalizing that he is already dead anyway, Nailer searches the wall until he feels a door ledge under his feet. He considers resting on the ledge until Pima comes, but he decides that Sloth will most likely never tell Pima he is here. Alone and without any other way out, he dives under the oil.
Chapter 4 Summary
Nailer feels for the door and finds a wheel lock. He attempts to turn the lock, but the wheel won’t budge. Running out of air, he kicks to the surface and climbs back on the door ledge. He hears Sloth at work on the copper wiring above and yells out to her that he found a way out and is coming to get her, saying he’ll let her go if she gets Pima. Sloth tells him that it’s too late for that: She knows he will tell Pima that she didn’t help him, so she is going to leave matters to “the Fates.” One of them will survive, and the other will either drown or be taken apart by the crew for disloyalty.
With no choice but to try again, he dives down and pulls harder at the wheel. Just as he is running out of air, the wheel begins to turn. He resurfaces to breathe and dives a third time, spinning the wheel and opening the door. The oil blows through the door, sucking Nailer into the next chamber. He curls into a ball and bounces off walls, finally blasting into open air and falling 50 feet into the ocean below. As he kicks to the surface, he looks back at the ship and sees the oil spewing out a tear in the tanker’s hull. Triumphantly, he swims to the beach and screams to his crew and Bapi, “I’m alive!” (36). As his crew stares at him in horror, he looks down to discover that he is bleeding profusely.
Chapter 5 Summary
Content Warning: This Chapter Summary and the Chapters 1-5 Analysis contain references to child abuse and addiction.
That night, Pima’s mother, Sadna, stitches Nailer’s shoulder and back, where a rusty shank of metal cut him. She explains that he is lucky not only for finding the oil but also for surviving his accident. Telling Nailer that “the Fates” were holding him close, she hands him the rusty shiv for a talisman. Nailer doesn’t believe in the Fates because if the Fates are real, then they put him with his father and aren’t trustworthy. Sadna advises him to get right with whatever gods he worships because someone was watching out for him. Knowing Sadna is the only adult he can rely on, Nailer agrees.
After thanking Sadna for stitching him up, Nailer leaves with Pima for the bonfires on the beach. Moon Girl gifts Nailer a bottle of liquor; she wants to give him a “luck gift” in hopes of sharing his luck (41). More gifts of food, liquor, and talismans arrive at their bonfire from others. Pima tells Nailer that due to the incoming storm, they won’t be doing salvage the next day. She also relates that she will need a new scuttle duct to replace him until he heals; Sloth was kicked out of the crew for disloyalty, her crew tattoos slashed by Bapi. Sloth left without protest, knowing she had gambled and lost. Most of the teens on Bright Sand Beach know luck is the only way they can survive.
As the wind picks up, Pima’s crew prepares to head back to their shacks. Nailer hopes that his father is still out drinking so he can slip in unnoticed. Once he arrives at his shack, however, he discovers that his father, Richard Lopez, is not only home but high on amphetamines. His father taunts him about his injury and questions him about how he will pay his way without work. When Richard finds out that Nailer lost his filter mask, the mood turns ugly, and Nailer knows his father is gearing up to beat him. Nailer quickly offers him Moon Girl’s liquor; his father accepts and begins drinking, leaving Nailer to escape. Before Nailer makes it to the safety of his dirty sheets, his father nicknames him “Lucky Boy.”
Chapters 1-5 Analysis
In Ship Breaker, Bacigalupi introduces a dystopian world that the rising seas and horrific storms of climate change have nearly destroyed. The void between the haves and the have-nots is boundless, with the rich “swanks” sailing the seas in luxury clipper ships that harness the jet streams and are crewed by bioengineered half-men servants, while everyone else scrabbles for survival. Children work as ship breakers on the destroyed coastline, surviving by crawling through derelict tankers and freighters and hunting for remnants of the obsolete fossil fuel technology that toppled Western civilization hundreds of years ago.
Bacigalupi uses informal, simple diction in this novel, which adds verisimilitude, as most of the characters are uneducated. Nailer lives in abject poverty, exposed to toxic fumes and danger as he scours the wrecked ships for pay that barely allows him to survive. The setting itself wages war; located slightly east of New Orleans on the new coastline, Nailer’s people suffer from bugs, snakes, toxic sludge in the water, suffocating heat, and violent “Class 6” hurricanes (since the contemporary system ranks hurricane strength on a scale of 1-5, the implication is that these storms far outstrip anything readers would recognize). The conflict between nature and humankind causes people to weigh morality against survival on a daily basis, and many characters believe that “the Fates” decree who will have the luck to make it through each day. Choice and free will are therefore subordinate to a plethora of gods.
On a more day-to-day level, work crews often take the place of family in keeping teens safe from the vagaries of fortune. Nailer’s lack of family is nevertheless a disadvantage. His father has a drug and alcohol addiction, but more than that, he is renowned for his ruthless violence in the home as well as on the beach. Nailer’s only safe place is the home of his friend Pima and her mother. Sadna is a source of strength for Nailer, and he relies on her to stitch him up after he nearly dies finding a “Lucky Strike” of undiscovered oil (the phrase alludes to the American gold rush). The situational irony of finding enough oil to make him rich only to nearly drown in it is not lost on Nailer, and it gives him a new perspective on the risks he must take simply to survive.
Bacigalupi uses luck and fate as a motif to examine the reason why some survive in this world while others succumb to drugs or despair. Nailer is hailed as Lucky Boy—first for finding the oil, and secondly for surviving his misadventure. However, his luck brings him nothing other than a small amount of liquor and food. He still must go home to his dangerously violent father as the storm rolls in. Sloth gambles that Nailer will be unlucky in escaping the reservoir, leaving her the oil as her own Lucky Strike, but she loses not only the gamble but also her livelihood; having broken a blood oath, she has little possibility of getting work elsewhere on the beach. To both Nailer and Sloth, luck is essential to survive.
Pima, however, believes that smarts balance out luck. Even though Nailer was lucky in finding the oil, he would have died if he hadn’t been smart enough to escape the reservoir. While the rest of the crew muses about how Sloth will survive without a crew, guessing that she will be reduced to selling body parts to the Harvesters, Pima reprimands them for relying too much on luck themselves, waiting for their own Lucky Strike to save them from the inevitable poverty that awaits them when they grow too large to be light crew. She reminds them that they all “pray to the Rust Saints to help us find something we can keep for ourselves […] and we end up just like Sloth” (49). Just being lucky or just being smart isn’t enough; they will have to be both to survive.
As they stare out at the clipper ships running on the ocean, Nailer dreams of sailing away on the ships that “whispered promises of speed and salt air and open horizons” (46). Moon Girl wistfully asks her fellow crewmembers if the wealthy swanks on the clipper ships even know that the ship breakers are on the beach. Pima replies, “We’re just flies on garbage to people like that” (46). The disparity between the wealthy and common people in this world is vast, and the analogy to parasitic insects illustrates just how insignificant Nailer’s people are to the upper class. Bacigalupi writes that “wherever the huge ships lay, scavenger gangs like Nailer’s swarmed like flies. Chewing away at iron meat and bones. Dragging the old world’s flesh up the beach” (6-7). They even refer to themselves as “scavengers” rather than salvagers. Scavengers eat carrion and anything else they can find but produce nothing for themselves. Scavengers in the ocean also include deadly great white sharks—a reference to the violence and Darwinian “survival of the fittest” world that Nailer’s crew lives in.
Bacigalupi uses water and storm imagery to describe the change that is coming for Nailer, as well as to evoke the volatile moods of Richard Lopez. Nailer smells the storm coming in the breeze blowing off the beach, and the storm will bring significant changes in his life. However, the storm also foreshadows his father’s mood when Nailer returns home to his shack. Richard is “sliding high” on amphetamines (55), but Nailer initially notes that “he [is] still a calm ocean” (55). This changes when Richard discovers that Nailer has lost his filter mask: “[A] storm was brewing, full of undertows and crashing surf and water spouts, the deadly weather that buffeted Nailer every day as he tried to navigate the coastline of his father’s moods” (56). Richard is a dangerous and unpredictable man, much like the killer storms that buffet the coastline. Once Nailer appeases his father with the bottle of liquor, however, the violence “seep[s] out the room” like water (59).
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