For the narrator, the jet plane he is making with Clark symbolizes his desire to escape his troubling reality. The time spent working with Clark on the design routinely takes him away from his own house—and the tension and possible divorce the story implies is affecting his family. The project also sparks his imagination, not only in the design process but also in his daydreaming on his way home, when he fantasizes so vividly about flying above the town that he can feel the g-force in his arms and the wind whipping his face.
The plane’s symbolic escapism also explains why the narrator decides he wants to keep the project between him and Clark, despite the pleasant afternoon they spent at Freddy’s. Freddy and the narrator clearly still have the same common interests and connection, but the narrator chooses to exclude Freddy for the same reason he ran from the house the year before. Witnessing the hardships experienced by Freddy’s family make it harder for the narrator to ignore the problems within his own, especially seeing Freddy’s mom fail to recover, which demonstrates for him that things do not always, in fact, work out. The narrator wants—really, needs—to believe that the jet plane will come to fruition. Having Freddy around will make it harder for him to keep believing, so he cuts him off. His partnership with Clark is filled with tension, but the narrator sticks with Clark because he views Clark as a fortunate person from a lucky family who is more likely to help him make his escape.
While the plane symbolizes escape for the narrator, in the story more broadly it actually signifies the impossibility of any such escape. While the narrator believes that he and Clark will soon build a working jet plane, the reader always understands that two school kids have essentially no chance of success in this project. The jet plane is a pipe dream, and that such a pipe dream is the narrator’s way of escaping implies that the family tensions he is trying to escape can’t, in fact, be escaped—a fact further further supported by the realization at the end of the story that Clark, who the narrator wants to work with because he sees him as living in a perfect family, himself is worried about tension at home.
The Plane Quotes in Flyboys
Clark was stubborn but there was no meanness in him. He wouldn’t turn on you; he was the same one day as the next, earnest and practical. Though his family had money and spent it freely, he wasn’t spoiled or interested in possessions except as instruments of his projects. In the eight or nine months we’d been friends we had shot two horror movies with his dad’s 8mm camera, built a catapult that worked so well his parents made us take it apart, and fashioned a monstrous, unsteerable sled out of a bed frame and five wooden skis we found in his neighbor’s trash.
They became an airplane, a jet—my jet. And through all the long run home I was in the cockpit, skimming sawtooth peaks, weaving through steep valleys, buzzing fishermen in the sound and tearing over the city in such a storm of flash and thunder that football games stopped in midplay, cheerleaders gaping up at me, legs still flexed under their plaid skirts.
Freddy lived at the dead end of the street. As Clark and I got closer I could hear the snarl of a chain saw from the woods behind the house. Freddy and I used to lose ourselves all day in there. I hung back while Clark went up to the house and knocked.
It was grisly stuff, and he didn’t scrimp on details or try to hide his pleasure in them, or in the starchy phrases he’d picked up from whatever book he was reading. That was Freddy for you. Gentle as a lamb, but very big on Vikings and Aztecs and Genghis Khan and the Crusaders, all the great old disembowlers and eyeball gougers. So was I. It was an interest we shared. Clark listened, looking a little stunned.
“He seems okay. You know him better than I do.”
“Freddy’s great, it’s just…”
Clark waited for me to finish. When it was clear that I wasn’t going to, he said, “Whatever you want.”
I told him that all things considered, I’d just as soon keep it to the two of us.
The Plane Symbol Timeline in Flyboys
