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Summary
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Flyboys, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Fear of Emotion
Family and Class
Imagination, Rationality, and Escape
Summary
Analysis
The narrator and his friend Clark decide they will build a jet plane, which they painstakingly design together at Clark’s house. Though Clark occasionally allows the narrator to handle the tools, Clark finds the narrator slow, so he’s usually the one doing the work. While Clark works, the narrator fools around with Clark’s samurai sword or wanders the house.
While the boys are working together, on their project, it is Clark who takes the lead. This is in part because the tools belong to him and he has more experience, but really, it has more to do with the boys’ differing approaches to the work. They seem to have quite different demeanors, and they seem a bit disconnected as friends, since they don’t interact much while they spend together.
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Clark’s mom isn’t home very much, so the narrator has free reign to make a sandwich, listen to records, and peruse photo albums while Clark works upstairs. In the photos, he sees a family that has been blessed with luck and wealth, never having to endure hardships like layoffs or illness or fighting. He longs to belong to a family like this, which frustrates him and makes him return to Clark’s room.
The narrator makes himself right at home in Clark’s empty house. That he must make his sandwich himself speaks to the lack of parental presence in the house. Still, the space is comfortable and the family he sees in the photos looks perfect to him. The narrator’s desire to step permanently into their world of wealth and good fortune speaks to what is lacking in his own home, and it emphasizes a class difference between his and Clark’s family which will continue to play into the events of the story.
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While Clark takes the lead in the hands-on drafting of the jet plane, the narrator takes the lead in the design choices for their project. He becomes domineering and at times mocks his friend’s suggestions, but Clark implements the narrator’s demands without seeming to register his condescension. The narrator believes it is Clark’s dedication to the project that allows him to prioritize the design over his pride. Clark’s devotion to the plane project also means that he rejects some of the narrator’s less helpful suggestions, and no amount of convincing can change his mind. This makes the narrator resentful, and he imagines whacking off Clark’s head with the samurai sword.
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The narrator finds Clark practical and stubborn without being unkind. His temperament is consistent day-to-day. Though Clark’s family is wealthy and lives lavishly in comparison to the narrator, the only possessions that Clark cares about are the tools he uses to make things. Together, the narrator and Clark have made films, crafted a bed-sized sled, and written a radio mystery that they entered into a local station’s competition. While the narrator’s imagination ran wild in planning these projects, it was Clark’s patience and dedication that ensured their dreaming came to fruition.
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While the narrator is aware that Clark does all the real work, he believes that he himself supplies all the genius in their relationship. At the end of each day of designing the jet plane, the precise and real blueprints Clark creates turn into a real plane in the narrator’s imagination. As he heads home, he imagines himself in the cockpit soaring over their town. He feels the g-force in his body and the plane shaking as he climbs higher in the sky than he thinks is possible.
After many months of working on the design of the plane, the planning process grows stagnant. Then one day at recess, Clark tells the narrator he has found them a canopy so they can begin construction. The narrator is frustrated when Clark won’t share the details with him out of fear that the narrator will divulge their secret plans. Instead, the narrator follows Clark as they walk through town after school, annoyed at how fast he needs to hustle to keep up with Clark. They pass a construction site where the narrator was once chased by older boys, cross the bridge over Flint Creek, and end up in a place that narrator knows well, having been there many times.
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The boys are heading to the house of a classmate, Freddy. The narrator tells Clark he does not remember Freddy having an airplane canopy, but Clark assures him he does. When the narrator asks Clark why he told Freddy about the plane in the first place when Clark had asked him to keep things quiet, Clark replies that he didn’t. Another classmate, Sandra, told Freddy about their project. At this, the narrator goes quiet, since he was the one who told Sandra behind Clark’s back.
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Walking up to the house, the narrator hears a chainsaw tearing through the trees in the woods beyond the house. He remembers the times when he and Freddy used to spend all day out there. The narrator chooses to hang behind Clark as he knocks on the door, which Freddy’s mother answers. She tells them Freddy is in the kitchen, and Clark goes inside. After hesitating, the narrator follows. When he passes Freddy’s mother, she ruffles his hair and tells the narrator he is “a sight for sore eyes.” Though he knows her greeting is earnest, he still hears it as a reproach.
In the kitchen, Freddy is sitting at the table reading. When the boys enter, he closes his book and greets them. The narrator says hi back and is hit with a flood of emotions. He and Freddy have not spoken in nearly a year, not since Freddy had to go to the hospital. Freddy’s mom follows them in and tells her son to fix a plate of cookies.
Clark says he can’t stay long, but when no one responds he settles in at the table. On the tabletop are images of animals and fish that were carved by Freddy’s brother, Tanker. He used to drink beer and tell them stories while he worked the wood with his knife. The narrator reflects that if Tanker had not died, the table would be fully covered in carvings by now.
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Freddy’s home is full of things that are familiar to the narrator. The house smells like laundry and the windows are fogged, and Freddy brings over oreos on a dingy but clean plate. The narrator watches Clark as he grabs a fistful of oreos, noting that Clark is unaware of the pre-existing dynamic going on around him.
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Freddy’s mother nibbles an oreo. She is a frail woman, who looks at the narrator with sad eyes. He wants to look away, but he makes himself look back at her. Freddy’s mother remarks that the narrator has grown a good deal since he last visited, asking Freddy if he noticed. Freddy responds, “like a weed,” and the narrator echoes, “by leaps and bounds.” This sharing of colloquialisms is a game that the three used to play when the narrator spent time there. Clark is confused by the exchange.
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Freddy’s mother then asks about the airplane, and Clark responds that they have just begun construction and are eager to return to the task at hand. He says they are looking for a canopy, but the conversation then falls quiet. Freddy’s mother encourages her son to tell the other boys about the book he’s reading, so Freddy describes the story of Tamerlane and his revenge on Persia, relishing the gory details and reciting phrases from the book. The narrator remembers that while Freddy is a gentle person, he is especially captivated by historical tales of danger and adventure, an interest they share. Clark, in contrast, is taken aback by Freddy’s story.
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The narrator thinks of Tanker again, who was killed in a motorcycle accident. In contrast to Clark’s lucky family, the narrator describes Freddy’s family as deeply unlucky. They have experienced bat infestations and chronic car issues, and Ivan, Freddy’s stepfather, is always caught when he dumps garbage illegally or forgets to pay back taxes. It seems to the narrator that Ivan is the source of the majority of the family’s troubles, not out of malice but because of his lack of forethought. Tanker was the only person who could get through to Ivan. When Tanker died, Ivan disappeared for a long time.
The narrator remembers how, when Tanker was home, everyone would sit at the table listening to his stories. He told stories about himself that were often embarrassing, but the way he shared them, sometimes tearing up, made them seem like they were “the most precious thing that ever happened to him.” The narrator remembers how Tanker was the center of the household: the house was always filled with his friends, he could fix anything that had broken, and he often took Freddy and the narrator on camping trips where he gave them Indian names.
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After Tanker’s death, the house lost its joy. It became quiet and empty, even after Ivan returned. Freddy’s mother stayed home in the dark all day, and when she made the effort to come out of her room to ask him and Freddy about their day and offer to feed them, the narrator wished she’d stayed in her room. Her sadness “appalled” him, and more than that, he was horrified by watching her failed attempts to overcome that sadness. In watching her grief, he came to understand that pain does not always heal, and things do not always work out.
In this period of time after Tanker’s death, the narrator recalls one day where he and Freddy were outside shooting baskets. Freddy’s mother called her son inside, and the narrator practiced his shooting for a long time without Freddy returning. He was overcome with a sense of unease as he listened to the ball bouncing under his hand, but he was scared to break the rhythm. The ball hitting the ground over and over sounded to him like “emptiness itself.” He finally held the ball still and looked to the house, where he imagined Freddy and his mother trapped inside the house with their grief. Suddenly, the narrator broke into a run, sprinting all the way home. It was this day that the older boys had chased him, attracted to his panic.
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During his recollection, the narrator is still unsure where his panic on that day originated, though he is confident that it was not just about Freddy’s family. At this same time, the strife of the narrator’s own family was beginning to dawn on him, though he tried not to notice it. Even without the ability to name it, his sense of foreboding lingered, triggered by the hardship and vulnerability of others as if misfortune were contagious. The grief of Freddy’s family made it harder to ignore his own family’s fragility.
It was an asthma attack that sent Freddy into the hospital on this same day, which the narrator learned from his teacher in school the following week. She encouraged the class to write get-well-soon messages and gave them the address of the hospital, but the narrator could not bring himself to visit. Ashamed of his failure to do so, the narrator could not face Freddy when he returned to school. The two boys began to mutually avoid each other. Clark and the narrator became friends soon after, and this is the first time the narrator and Freddy have interacted since.
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Back in the present, Clark eats the rest of the cookies on the plate while listening to Freddy talk about Tamerlane. When Freddy finishes, the narrator then offers another gruesome story about Quantrill’s Raiders. As he speaks, Freddy is enraptured, and Freddy’s mother exclaims at the all the plot twists. Clark, however, listens without interest, impatient to return to their work and too pragmatic to enjoy their storytelling. The narrator is aware that Clark is seeing a new side of him that he likely judges. Still, the narrator continues to elaborate and play up the drama of his tale, pleasantly reminded of the joy he used to feel knowing Freddy was hanging onto his every word.
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Ivan then enters the kitchen, interrupting the narrator’s story. He, like everything else in the house, is exactly how the narrator remembers: a big white face wearing a too-small, red hunting cap. Ivan is caked in thick, black mud up to his knees, and he exclaims when seeing the narrator at his kitchen table once more. One of the lenses in his glasses has a dot of mud in the center, making it look like a pair of joke glasses to the narrator. Ivan explains that the truck is stuck.
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All three boys follow Ivan outside and consider the dilemma of Tanker’s old, beat-up pickup truck stuck in the mud. Ivan says the truck is “past her prime,” then Freddy and the narrator pile on their own colloquial phrases, just as they did with Freddy’s mother in the kitchen. The joke ends when Ivan says he can’t bring himself to sell Tanker’s truck, nearly breaking into tears. The narrator is horrified by the rush of emotions, but Ivan bites his lip to catch himself.
Ivan instructs them to empty out the truck bed, which is full of logs from the trees Ivan has been clearing from the property. Freddy and the narrator used to hide in the trees at the back of the property to spy on the family next door, but Ivan has cut down so many trees that the neighbor’s house is now in plain sight. Ivan has been felling trees to sell as firewood, which the narrator knows is foolish and unprofitable. He recalls how he and Freddy used to spend their summers in these woods pretending they were in unexplored American territory, a tropical jungle, or on Mars. Nearly all the forest, and everything the boys imagined it to be, is now gone.
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Ivan believes emptying the logs will be enough to get the vehicle out, but Clark disagrees. Ivan, Freddy, and the narrator exchange more colloquialisms while Clark walks over to the truck, tiptoeing through the muck in an effort to stay clean. Only when he sinks to his ankle in the mud does he give in to the mess. Clark assesses the truck and suggests that they lay down logs to give the tires more purchase. The narrator says he thinks they should just unload the truck, but Ivan is intrigued by Clark’s idea.
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Freddy and the narrator walk up to the barn for shovels to dig out the ruts, and when they are alone, the narrator realizes how skinny Freddy has become. He then tells Freddy that his family is going to move, though his parents have not told him so. Freddy responds that he hopes they end up staying. Both boys are uncomfortable, and they exchange more cliché phrases to lighten the tension, saying “there’s no place like home” and “home is where the heart is.”
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Back at the truck, they take turns digging out the wheels. They all struggle to find footing, slipping and kneeling in the mud until they are covered up to their waists. Clark directs Freddy and the narrator as they dig out trenches and lay down wood, yelling instructions at the other two boys. Once they finish engineering the trenches, the three of them push while Ivan starts the truck.
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The wheels spray mud as they spin, covering Clark and Freddy while the narrator misses a majority of the spray. Ivan rocks the truck back and forth. The exhaust fumes make the narrator’s eyes burn, and he watches as a log flies back past Clark’s head. Clark is too focused to notice the near miss. Finally, the truck breaks loose and Ivan drives away.
The boys are left exhausted and plastered with muck. Freddy tries to catch his breath, gasping loudly as the three stand in the sudden silence in the absence of the roaring pickup. Clark methodically tries to scrape the mud from his body with a stick, which the narrator finds overly optimistic due to the sheer amount of it. Freddy finally recovers and stands up, looking unwell. He suggests they go back up to the house to get cleaned up, but Clark asks if they can at last go look at the plane canopy in the barn.
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The narrator admits that he had hoped all afternoon that Clark would forget about the canopy because he is sure Freddy does not have one. He is shocked when Freddy presents the airplane canopy to them. Though the narrator has been in the barn hundreds of times, he never noticed the canopy hidden among the other junk. Unlike the rest of the things in the barn, the canopy has been dusted and polished. Besides some minimal scratches and the canopy being slightly smaller than the plans accounted for, it is perfect and real. The narrator is sure their plane will get built. Clark asks what Freddy wants for it, and he responds that they can have it for free.
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They return to the house, and Freddy’s mother insists that the boys take off their messy clothes and wash up. Clark refuses, only washing his face and hands, while Freddy and the narrator each take long showers. Freddy’s mother gives the narrator some of Tanker’s old clothes to wear and sends him home with his muddy clothing wrapped in butcher-paper. Freddy walks Clark and the narrator to the end of the street and then disappears. The two boys stop at the bridge and throw rocks at bottles. The narrator is amped up from their success and by Tanker’s old motorcycle jacket, which he was given to wear home.
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Clark tells the narrator that Freddy wants in on their project, which the narrator is immediately opposed to because they would need to redesign the whole cockpit. He confirms that Freddy will still give them the canopy, then asks Clark what he said to Freddy. Clark assures the narrator that he did not commit to having Freddy join. Clark asks his opinion, and the narrator tells him that Freddy is great, then trails off. Clark responds that they can do whatever the narrator wants, and he says he would like to keep the project between the two of them.
As they cross through town, Clark asks the narrator to join him for dinner to help moderate his mother’s anger when she finds out what happened to his clothes. Clark drags out the walk home, lingering to look at window displays and car lots. When they finally reach his house, the lights are on and music plays loud enough to reach the street. Clark pauses on the sidewalk, listening. Finally, he determines that the music is from South Pacific, which means that his mother is in a good mood.
