Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Freak the Mighty, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Friendship
The Power of Storytelling
Memory, Grief, and Trauma
Family Legacy vs. Individuality
Summary
Analysis
Max figures that he’s going to get in trouble for running into the pond. The cops drive him home. Grim hoses Max off with a weird look on his face while the cops make it sound like Max heroically rescued Freak. Grim seems surprised, but Max thinks this is silly—he knows it must’ve looked like he rescued Freak, but in reality, Freak rescued him. Gram rubs Max down with a towel and he gives Max a bowl of ice cream, while Grim makes Max a cup of coffee. He gives it to Max in a fancy china cup like it’s a big deal. Instead of asking why Grim is being so weird, Max just thanks him.
Grim and Gram seem to treat Max so oddly because they want to encourage this kind of heroic behavior—they might think that praising Max for saving Freak will help Max to make better choices and avoid following in his father’s footsteps. This seems strange to Max because Max is well aware that he’s not evil and violent, and in his experience, he didn’t do anything worth noting. As Max says, Freak saved him by telling him what to do; Max couldn’t have done it alone.
Themes
Max asks for sugar in his coffee and Grim calls Max “son” when he says yes. This is new—Grim always calls Max by Max or Maxwell. Gram’s expression suggests that she thinks this is how things are supposed to be. Gram makes Max promise to stay away from “the hoodlum boy” (Tony D.), but Grim insists that Max can handle himself. Max assures Gram that he’ll run from Tony D. Gram starts to say something about how Max is so much bigger than Tony D., but Grim interjects and says that Max is just going to avoid confrontation. Max just nods and he doesn’t mention that Tony D. carries a knife and probably has guns. Max doesn’t want Gram to worry.
It seems that when Gram first heard Max got into a scuffle with Tony D., she assumed that Max was the aggressor. This shows again that Gram doesn’t believe the truth in front of her eyes that Max is actually kind and nonviolent. Max, however, shows the reader how kind he is when he says he doesn’t want Gram to worry. He wants to do everything in his power to make the people around him feel comfortable, even if they don’t always show him the same kindness or courtesy.
Themes
In summers past, Max has spent most of his time watching TV and reading comic books. But this summer, with Freak around, Max gets up every day. Freak wakes Max up by banging on the basement door and shouting that they must go slay dragons and rescue maidens. One day, Max notes that Freak must have ants in his pants. Freak suspiciously asks if Gwen asked Max to say that, and then he says that out of the 2,247 species of ants, none are in his pants. Max just laughs.
With Max’s help, Freak’s quests can be more real because assuming the Freak the Mighty persona enables Freak to travel around town. Even though Max focuses on the ways in which Freak helps him (getting him out of bed, helping him think), Max is also having a major positive effect in Freak’s life by giving him this mobility.
Themes
One day, Freak proposes a quest of a journey to the East. Max now knows what a quest is—it started with King Arthur, since Arthur needed to keep his knights busy and he wanted to prove how strong and brave they were. Privately, Max thinks that the quests proved that the knights were dumb since they wore tin cans and prayed, but Freak is sensitive about quests and King Arthur. Freak goes on about how dragons aren’t just monsters; they’re symbols of the terrifying natural world and “an archetype of the unknown.” Confused, Max asks what an “archy-type” is.
Though Freak hasn’t shared that he’s going to undergo an operation to receive a bionic body, it’s telling here that he positions dragons as a symbol of the unknown as well as something that knights slay. Since Freak’s bionic body will turn him into a modern-day knight, the story that Freak is going to receive this surgery helps Freak deal with the unknown—that is, the fact that he’s going to die.
Themes
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Freak reaches into his backpack for his dictionary and hands it to Max. He walks Max through looking up the word, though Max hates it—none of the letters look right, and he doesn’t know how to spell. Max looks for the words underlined in red ink, since those are the ones that Freak has already looked up. Finally, Freak spells the entire word and Max finds the definition. He insists that it just means “pattern” and that it doesn’t say anything about dragons. Freak says that he meant the second definition, which refers to a symbol or idea that’s expressed in dreamlike images. Bored, Max pretends to understand. Freak shakes his head and he says he doesn’t know why he even cares—dinosaurs had peanut-sized brains and they ruled the earth for years.
Even if Max doesn’t appreciate Freak’s insistence on using the dictionary right now, the fact that Freak is adamant about teaching Max how to understand new concepts will almost certainly have an effect on Max in the long term. Given that Max is the narrator of the story, it’s clear that Max will eventually understand what Freak is trying to teach him and he’ll apply it to his own storytelling.
Themes
