Lost Boy: The True Story of Captain Hook

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2017

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Prologue-Chapter 4

Part 1, Chapter 5-Part 2, Chapter 9

Part 2, Chapter 10-Part 3, Chapter 14

Part 3, Chapter 15-Part 4, Chapter 19

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Part 1, Prologue-Chapter 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1: “Charlie”

Part 1, Prologue Summary

Content Warning: This section of the guide features descriptions of graphic violence, the death of children, implied rape, and abusive relationships.

Lost Boy begins with a warning from the narrator, Jamie, who declares that Peter Pan is a liar. Although Jamie once loved Peter, Peter now sees Jamie as a villain. Jamie is here to tell his side of the story, which is what “really happened.”

Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary

Jamie dreams of a dead woman who is covered in blood, her throat slit. He has the same dream every night. He does not know who she is, and there are no girls or women on the island. Peter brought him to this island a long time ago and told him to forget his old life. Peter finds boys in the “Other Place” (the real world) and brings them to this magical island, where they never grow up. The boys all live in a hollow tree. Now, Jamie awakens when he hears Charlie crying in his sleep. Charlie is the youngest boy and one of the newest. After comforting the five-year-old boy, Jamie tells Peter that Charlie is too young to be on the island at all. Peter does not seem to care for Charlie and has grown bored with him. Jamie hums Charlie a song to lull him back to sleep. This irritates Peter, as the song is a remnant of his old life. Jamie has been with Peter the longest of all the other boys; he remembers Peter leading him to a tunnel under a tree that took them to the island.

In the morning, Peter tells the boys that they are going to raid the pirates who live in the bay. Jamie is apprehensive because there are six new boys in the group who have no idea what to do during a raid, and he does not think they are ready. One boy, Del, is sick, and Jamie is worried that he might get hurt or worse during the raid. Because Peter is impervious to harm, he does not care about the boys who get sick or injured. The island keeps them all young, but unlike Peter, they are not immune to illness or violence. Sometimes, one of the boys will grow up, though no one knows why. In these cases, Peter drives the boys away to live with the pirates. Jamie has been on the island for “one or two hundred seasons” (21) but only looks about four years older than when he arrived at the age of eight.

Now, the boys gather around Peter as he outlines the plan for the raid. Most of them, like the twins Nod and Fog, are excited. Nod and Fog have been on the island almost as long as Jamie, and they like battle. Charlie does not leave Jamie’s side, and Jamie worries about how to keep him safe during the raid. Peter sends the boys off to gather food before they begin the mission. Jamie tries to tell Peter that the raid is a bad idea, and that Del will not survive it, but Peter assures Jamie that it will be fun and suggests that Del stay behind if he is too sick. He is tired of hearing Del cough. Jamie wonders how Peter would act if Jamie were sick, but Peter insists that Jamie will never be ill.

Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary

The boys return with food from their traps. Jamie is relieved to see that one of the new boys, Nip, is tired after the excursion. Jamie does not trust Nip and hopes that he will be “too tired to cause trouble” (32). When the meat is cooked, the boys are given their allotted portions, based on their seniority and Peter’s favor. Nip and Charlie, the newest boys, are given the smallest amount. Nip complains to Del, who divvied up the portions, and tries to take his share. In self-defense, Del kicks hot coals into Nip’s face. Nip screams and rubs his eyes, which makes the coals burn him even more. Peter complains that Nip’s screams are hurting his ears, so Jamie knocks Nip out. After a few moments of silence, Peter gets bored again and starts to tell the boys a ghost story.

The story is about “a little boy with yellow hair like baby duck feathers” (38), and Jamie notices the similarities between the boy in the story and Charlie. The boy in the story gets separated from his mother and siblings in the woods. While looking for his family, he finds a pond and thinks that his reflection is a friend to play with. However, there is a crocodile in the pond. Trying several times to save his mirrored “friend” from the crocodile, the boy does not realize that he is trying to save his own reflection. Eventually, the boy’s mother finds the pond and her son, but she is too late. The crocodile leaps out of the water and drags the boy away. The mother weeps at the edge of the pond and turns into a flower. Jamie worries that this story is a warning for him about what will happen to Charlie if Jamie keeps protecting him.

Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary

Most of the boys leave for the pirate camp despite the late hour. Jamie and Charlie are left behind with Peter and Nip, who is still unconscious. Peter tells Jamie to kick Nip awake; Jamie obeys and beats Nip further to discourage Nip’s retribution. He warns Nip to leave the other boys alone. Peter is excited to be off; he and Nip leave, but Jamie shows Charlie a shortcut to where the boys will stop for the night before reaching the pirate camp. Charlie is happy that their path will keep them away from Nip. When they approach the Bear Cave, where they plan to camp for the night, they can see from a distance that the other boys have lit a fire and are cooking meat.

The last stretch of their walk requires Jamie and Charlie to walk single-file along a narrow path. Jamie tries to get Charlie to walk by himself, but Charlie is scared, especially after Peter’s story. Jamie finally agrees to carry the crying Charlie down the path. He wishes that he could promise Charlie that he will never get hurt, but he cannot. All he can promise is that he will not leave Charlie alone.

Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary

Charlie wipes his tears and tells Jamie that his older brother once locked him outside for crying. That was when Peter found him and brought him to the island. Jamie is shocked to learn that Charlie has a family that he could go back to, unlike most of the other boys. He does not have time to contemplate this information further because he hears a strange sound. Jamie knows that it is one of the Many-Eyed, a monster that inhabits the island. The other boys have not noticed the sound, as they are too busy dancing around the fire and celebrating their killing of a deer. Jamie raises the alarm that a Many-Eyed is coming, and the boys leap into action. Jamie asks Del to stay behind and watch over Charlie. Then he takes Nod, Fog, and a boy named Harry to fight off the monster.

They find the Many-Eyed, which looks like a giant spider. Peter has forbidden the boys from starting trouble with the Many-Eyed, but Jamie hopes to drive the monster off the edge of a cliff. His plan does not work, and the Many-Eyed attacks them. Jamie stabs it, and the monster screams, calling for help. Jamie does not want more Many-Eyed to come to its rescue, so he moves to disembowel it, but the creature rushes at Harry and kills him. Jamie and the Many-Eyed fight, and Jamie finally manages to kill it. Using the blood of the Many-Eyed, he plans to create a trail to the pirate camp in order to throw suspicion off the boys in case other Many-Eyed come looking for their friend. Peter arrives and angrily demands to know what Jamie has done.

Part 1, Prologue-Chapter 4 Analysis

As the opening chapters introduce Jamie and the rest of the boys and establish the nature of Peter’s tyrannical hold over all of them, it is immediately apparent that Henry’s novel deviates significantly from Barrie’s source material. By denying Peter’s magical island an official name, for example, she creates a sense of wordless foreboding about the setting, and just as the island is never called Neverland, the boys are not called the Lost Boys. As a nod to the original story, Henry has Jamie refer to his “little band of lost boys” (48), but this only happens once; otherwise, the term is not used outside of the book’s title. The island in this book is also quite different from Neverland, for Barrie’s book features no Many-Eyed, and Henry’s book omits the Indigenous American characters entirely in an attempt to avoid the problematic and racist characterizations that haunt Barrie’s original play and novel. There are, however, many surface-level similarities between the original version and Henry’s reimagining, for Peter and his boys still live in a hollow tree and spend their time fighting the pirates and swimming with mermaids. Additionally, Peter’s love of fighting and his impishness remain consistent with the original story. Perhaps most significantly, however, Henry uses the known relationship of the original Peter and Captain James Hook as an understated foreshadowing, for although Jamie is currently one of Peter’s Lost Boys, the source material demands that there will be a reckoning between the two characters at some point in Henry’s novel.

The Tension Between Childhood and Adulthood is immediately apparent in the dynamic between Jamie and the other boys, particularly Peter. As the boy who has been with Peter the longest, Jamie is the most grown-up of all the boys in both age and behavior; he appears to be about 12 years old, which is older than Peter’s apparent age. Jamie also takes on the adult role of caring for certain boys, like Charlie, who are too helpless and frightened to take care of themselves. Thus, he acts in much the same way that a parent might, and he is unwilling to fully participate in Peter’s world of endless play because he recognizes that the boys have needs beyond play. Jamie’s fate is also foreshadowed quite early in the novel when he notes that boys who grow up sometimes join the pirates. Taken with the knowledge that boys who come to the island cannot return to the Other Place, it logically follows that if they do eventually grow up instead of dying in battle or remaining young forever, their only option is to turn to piracy.

From the very beginning, Jamie and Peter are established to be foils to one another even if they are not yet enemies in an official capacity. This dynamic becomes clear when Peter’s childish, self-centered behavior proves to be the driving force behind the boys’ many dangerous and ill-considered actions. Even at the interpersonal level, Peter is clearly much more childish than Jamie is, for he exhibits jealousy when Jamie pays attention to Charlie instead of him, refusing to acknowledge that because Charlie is only five years old, he needs a greater amount of care. Easily irritated by the other boys’ noises and resenting such disturbances to his environment, he proves himself to be either unable or unwilling to see other people as fully realized individuals. Instead, he judges their worth based on how well they serve him as playmates. By this unfair standard, Charlie fails to measure up because he is too small to participate in Peter’s violent games. Jamie, by contrast, often considers the other boys’ inner lives and strives to maintain a semblance of peaceful equilibrium within the tumultuous group dynamics. Although he is no saint himself, this greater awareness allows him to care for Charlie and remain watchful of Nip’s problematic behavior.

One of the central elements of the novel is the interplay of Reality Versus Make-Believe, for although Peter treats everything as a game and insists that raiding the pirates is fun, it soon becomes clear that a deep and deadly danger underlies every “game” he forces the boys to play. While the original story embraces a Neverland that holds nothing but lighthearted adventures for its childish inhabitants, Lost Boy turns that assumption on its head. Although Peter acts as though he is only playing games, the boys who follow him really do suffer and die. They get sick, they get injured, and there is nobody but Jamie to care for them, for Peter’s indifference to their plight never changes. Instead of a cheerful adventure story, Henry therefore crafts a tale about real children fighting real pirates and monsters, dying of tuberculosis, sustaining severe injuries, and dying horribly in the process. Thus, Peter’s malicious ghost story is ironically the only make-believe element of this part of the book, and even so, it represents a thinly veiled threat of real violence that Peter wants to enact against Charlie.

As the early chapters of the novel establish the sinister nature of Peter’s control over the other boys, it is clear that Peter is deeply invested in Gaining Power Over Others at any cost. Even his urging for Jamie to forget his former life indicates that his relationship to his most trusted playmate is emotionally abusive at best, for Peter’s desires reign supreme regardless of any objections that Jamie might have. However, although Peter does hold the lion’s share of power on the island, Jamie has a lot of power in his own right, even if he is not yet fully aware of it. The boys trust Jamie, and he is Peter’s favorite. He is also physically powerful enough to overpower troublesome boys like Nip and monsters like the Many-Eyed. While the balance of power is clearly in Peter’s favor at this point in the story, these early scenes suggest that it will tip in Jamie’s favor as the story continues.