Being Henry David

Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2013

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-4

Chapters 5-7

Chapters 8-11

Chapters 12-15

Chapters 16-18

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 1 Summary

Content Warning: This section of the guide describes and discusses the novel’s treatment of mental health, trauma, and death by suicide. This section also contains references to violence, child abuse, and drug use, which appear in the source text.

Seventeen-year-old Danny Henderson wakes up in an unfamiliar place. He can’t remember anything. There are sounds and lights all around him. A strange man repeatedly asks him if he’s going to eat what he’s holding. Danny hears a voice on the loudspeaker and sees a sign hanging from the ceiling. He realizes the words on the sign are cities and that he’s in a station, but he doesn’t know who or where he is. He checks his pockets for ID, but only finds $10. He realizes he’s holding a book when the stranger grabs it from him. He chases the man, determined to get the book back because it might contain a clue as to who he is. Finally, he wrestles the book away from the man. Two cops appear and try to decide if the stranger, Frankie, or Danny are to blame for the scuffle. Danny tells the cops the book’s title—Henry David Thoreau’s Walden—to prove that it’s his. The officers return it, explain that Frankie has a disorder where he eats strange objects, and let Danny go. He opens the book, but his name isn’t inside.

Chapter 2 Summary

Danny doesn’t know what to do now that his book has failed to help him. He goes into the station bathroom and stares at himself in the mirror. The face looking back doesn’t jog his memory. A teenager named Jack emerges from a stall and teases Danny, inviting him to get food together. Danny introduces himself as Henry David because he can’t remember his real name. Jack decides to call him Hank for short.

Jack and Danny get hamburgers and chat. Jack informs Danny that they’re at Penn Station—a train station in New York City. Jack tells Danny a little bit about himself and asks to hear Danny’s story, but Danny still can’t remember who he is. When Jack starts guessing where he came from and why he ran away from home, Danny gets scared that he did something terrible to cause his memory loss. He feels an inner darkness and worries that Jack might be right—Danny might have killed someone and forgotten it. He doesn’t understand why Jack is talking to him or if Jack is safe but agrees to leave the station with Jack to find a place to sleep.

Jack leads Danny to his campsite behind a dumpster. A teenager with heavy eye makeup appears and introduces herself as Nessa. As they chat, Danny reveals that he can’t remember anything before waking up in Penn Station. Jack guesses that he has amnesia. Danny shows him Walden, insisting it’s a clue to his past. Jack isn’t sure but agrees to let Danny spend the night in their camp. Danny lies awake thinking about the pond in Concord, Massachusetts, that the book is about. He wishes he could go to the woods like Thoreau did.

Chapter 3 Summary

An argument wakes Danny. A young man named Simon insists that Jack return his money, accusing Jack of cutting the cocaine he sold him with powdered sugar and demanding a reimbursement. Both are afraid they’ll get in trouble with their boss, Magpie. Jack insists he’s innocent. Danny interrupts them and accuses Simon of cutting the drugs himself to manipulate Jack for more money. Simon gets angry, pulls out a knife, and charges Jack. To protect Jack, Danny hits Simon in the head with a brick. Simon falls to the ground bleeding. Danny panics, but Jack and Nessa insist everything is okay because Simon is still alive. Then, a construction worker appears, and the teenagers flee to Magpie’s house, where Danny collapses from a wound in his side: Simon stabbed him with his knife.

Chapter 4 Summary

Danny dreams that he’s in a cabin in the woods. He feels safe in this space until a giant black bird swoops in and attacks his face.

Danny wakes up in Magpie’s apartment. Magpie has tended his wounds, but Danny gets a bad feeling. Magpie sits the teenagers down and explains what will happen next: They have to split up because the construction worker saw them together. Magpie doesn’t want his drug business compromised. He orders Jack to meet up with two of his employees at Port Authority, tells Nessa to change her appearance, and insists that Danny works for him now. When Danny protests, Magpie puts a gun to Danny’s head.

Afterwards, Magpie lets Danny, Jack, and Nessa shower and change into new clothes. After they leave, Jack and Nessa hug goodbye. Jack then leads Danny to Port Authority. On the way, Jack reveals that Nessa is his sister, and “The word [‘sister’] stirs something inside [Danny]” (48), who feels suddenly lightheaded.

Jack admits that he brought Danny to Magpie as a recruit. He apologizes and thanks Danny for saving him. Danny has a sudden desire to flee and starts running, but Jack catches up. At the station, Jack gives Danny Simon’s wallet and tells him to take the train to Concord if that’s what he wants. He and Nessa can’t leave each other and can’t go home because their dad is abusive. However, Jack wants Danny to be free.

Jack leaves and two cops approach Danny. He fears they’re after him for attacking Simon. He gives Frankie Simon’s social security card, library card, and wallet to eat. He keeps Simon’s cash, manages to convince the cops that Frankie was trying to steal from him, and boards the train to Concord.

Chapters 1-4 Analysis

In the novel, protagonist Danny Henderson’s first-person narration is unusual. Because Danny wakes up in New York City’s Penn Station without any memory of who he is or why he is there, he is in the same position as the reader—Danny needs to orient to his surroundings and the mystery of his identity in the same way that someone opening the novel for the first time has little sense of its characters or setting. This aligns readers and protagonist, as both are motivated to pursue answers to the novel’s central question: Who is the main character? Danny is therefore a tourist narrator, who will be discovering his world alongside readers.

Danny’s inability to remember anything about his life before his sudden awakening incites the narrative conflict and creates narrative tension: The unfamiliar location is overwhelming, as “there is too much” (1) sensory input for him to process. The novel dramatizes the disorienting experience through Danny’s response to the station: “Blurred figures, moving. White lights. Muffled waves of sound. Voices. Music. Chaos” (1). Choppy sentence fragments that gradually get shorter, until they are syncopated into one-word observations capture Danny’s troubled state of mind: He can barely register and identify what he hears, let alone describe it—a state of mind that will differ sharply from his first encounter of the woods near Walden Pond. Because of his memory loss, every facet of Danny’s surroundings is new and therefore threatening and confusing.

Danny’s memory loss complicates his ability to understand himself, establishing the novel’s thematic exploration of Identity in the Absence of Memory. Without his memory, Danny has no past. Without his past, he has no true sense of himself as a person. Indeed, Danny is even unfamiliar with his physical appearance. Because of this missing sense of self, everything that Danny experiences in these opening four chapters makes him question who he is and why he might be on the run in the streets of New York. In the absence of certainty, every explanation becomes a possibility.

At the same time, the novel gives readers clues in the form of Danny’s bodily responses to suggestions about his past. For example, when Jack suggests in Chapter 2 that “Maybe [Danny] killed somebody,” Danny silently panics as sweat “breaks out on [his] upper lip” (17). He has a physical reaction to Jack’s proposition, even though Jack is teasing. While readers are unsure why this scenario provokes Danny’s fear, it is clear that a sense memory has been triggered. Similarly, when Jack reveals that Nessa is his sister in Chapter 4, hearing the word “sister” causes Danny to sense “the beginning of a solid memory” (48) and to feel ill. Danny’s body is reacting to information about his identity because his brain cannot yet access what has happened to him. Without a sense of self, Danny can’t contextualize these physiological responses. The novel’s interest in the idea that some memory of Danny’s past trauma is stored in his body relies in part on a controversial theory promoted in popular self-help books such as Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score, the claims of which have not been scientifically proven.

Since he has so little of his own to ground him, every object in Danny’s periphery becomes crucial. This is why Danny is so immediately invested in the book he wakes up holding: Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. Danny’s regard for this book introduces the novel’s explorations of the Influence of Literature on Personal Growth. Danny protects his copy of Walden as soon as he realizes it belongs to him. He doesn’t remember reading the book, but has an instinctual connection to it that foreshadows the ways in which Walden will impact Danny’s journey of self-discovery and personal growth in the coming chapters. Thoreau’s book is about seeking enlightenment, and therefore it indirectly promises to clarify Danny’s questions about who he is and what he might have experienced.