83 pages • 2 hours read
E. B. WhiteThe Trumpet of the Swan
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1970A 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.
Themes
The Journey to Adulthood
In order to reach adulthood, Louis must use his intelligence and abilities to navigate around the inability to speak, and in so doing, becomes much more dependent on human modes of communication. As a child, Louis faces the dilemma of navigating swan life without a voice. Because Louis feels his disability marks him, he grows up with a sense of worry, unease, and sadness at not being able to fully communicate with his family. In adolescence, his inability to speak becomes a major impediment to love. Louis chooses to learn to read and write, but this does not help him with other swans. After his father presents him with a trumpet, he learns to play bugle calls and songs. This allows him to pursue a professional career as a musician and he develops ambitions, another marker of human life. By the time Serena reenters his life, Louis can use his trumpet to woo her properly, and transitions back to a swan’s life—free of work and focused on his family.
Sam Beaver is on a similar journey to reach early adulthood by the end of the novel. As a child, he wrestles with open-ended questions that have no clear answers and creates private spaces for himself where he can work out a system of values and a way of being in the world. This involves pondering answers to his questions and taking independent action to solve problems in the real world. Though we do not see him turn to a close friend for advice, we do know that he has resources in the form of books, teachers, and trustworthy adults. The Head Man at the Philadelphia Zoo becomes Sam’s first professional mentor figure in his journey to adulthood.
Social Systems
Because of his disability, Louis must learn two social systems in order to complete his journey to adulthood. On the one hand, he must understand the values of his swan world: finding a wife and having children of his own like his parents before him. Male swans woo mates by making impressive sounds, a lesson Louis learns the hard way when he attempts to woo Serena at Red Rock Lakes without a voice. Along the way to this goal, Louis achieves admirable things like becoming an acclaimed musician. However, as soon as he has played well enough to win Serena’s love and earned enough money to pay off his father’s debt, he gives up performing to truly be a swan.
At the same time, by attending school, camp, and working in Boston and Philadelphia, Louis learns to navigate the social norms of the human world. From Mrs. Hammerbotham he learns the importance of being literate, from Mr. Brickle, the importance of upholding one’s work obligations, and from his career, the formalities of checking into a high-end hotel, and from his relationship with Sam, how to write a proper letter to an old friend. While, in some cases, Louis still needs Sam’s help, he is also quite able to negotiate on his own behalf.
In understanding these divergent worlds, Louis has skills neither the swans nor Sam ever will. The cob is illiterate, which prevents him from communicating with the music store owner, and has little experience of humans, which makes it difficult for him to accept medical treatment for his “superficial” wound at a hospital in Billings (200). None of the other swans really understand the full extent of Louis’s human experiences, and can only appreciate the objects around his neck as novelties. While Sam is a very sensitive boy who earns the trust and respect of the swan family and shares a unique relationship with Louis, he doesn’t understand swan speech and can’t see zoo animals as deserving freedom. Sam intervenes for Louis, but not for other animals.
The Nature of Friendship
Although Louis and Sam both love their families and have great respect for their fathers, it is really through friendship that they find answers to the great dilemmas of life. Louis’s father gives him the trumpet, but Louis turns to Sam for actual help and advice in understanding what he could or should do next. Though the Boatman is more employer than friend, Louis also engages in amiable conversations with him. It is in friendship that Louis finds camaraderie, understanding, support, help, and guidance. The strength and importance of his friendship with Sam highlights the ways in which family, and parents in particular, are distant supports.
Sam has a similar relationship with his own parents: They are loving and supportive, but not particularly helpful in answering his profound questions. At the end of the book, Sam asks his father the meaning of the word “crepuscular,” but his father cannot give him a definitive answer (208). It is possible that Sam creates private spaces for himself in part because his parents, though loving, don’t really understand him. Talking with the Head Man about the zoo is an eye opening experience for Sam. Learning more about the animals inspires him to leave a letter of appreciation for the Head Man, as one enthusiast to another.
Finally, the boys at Camp Kookooskoos learn as much from each other as they do from Mr. Brickle. When they collectively comment on solutions to the skunk or tease Applegate Skinner, they are teaching each other what is important and how to behave.
Related Titles
By E. B. White
