The Whale Talk Sparknotes

Is It The Journey or The Destination?

All people have all different views. This book, Whale Talk by Chris Crutcher, was written from the eyes of an African American teenage male. His name is The Tao (T.J. for short) He has an English teacher who usually always coaches wrestling, he decides he doesn’t want to contribute to wrestling this year. Mr.Simet (The English teacher) has decided he wants to coach for a Swim Team at Cutter High School.
Mr.Simet approaches T.J. in the hallways during school, he asked T.J. if he would help put together a swim team. Mr.Simet really didn’t want to coach wrestling so he eventually persuaded him to help. As T.J. was walking away, down the halls, he sees Mike Barbour teasing Chris Coughlin for wearing his dead
stepbrother’s lettermen jacket. He tells them to stop; protecting Chris Coughlin was something T.J. was used too.
Later that day he sees Chris at the YMCA swimming, then he decides to ask him if he would like to join the schools swim team. He excitingly accepts. T.J. decided that he wasn’t going to be able to walk around every place that had water and ask everyone if they wanted to join the swim team. He makes fliers and goes to the beach and puts them on people’s windshields. Later that day he gets two phone calls and has two more people on the team.
When T.J. starts working out at the All Night Fitness center, he sees a man sleeping in the sauna starts talking to him and the man (Oliver) tells T.J. that he doesn’t have money for a house because he is working two jobs to pay his son’s college tuition. He had then realized his life wasn’t as bad as it gets.
Soon the team had enough swimmers or teammates to start practicing. When they start practicing Oliver becomes the assistant manager, bus driver, and coach until Mr.Simet can start coming to practices. Soon enough the team gives him a nickname of Icko. The teams first swim meet was where they were handed their goals. They were handed a piece of paper that had all of the requirements for their lettermen jackets.
On the bus rides, to and from the meets the team starts to open up to each other. Some start to talk about their families, some told stories, the coaches usually tried to stay quiet and let them talk. After all, this team was pretty much made up of misfits as T.J. put it. Everyone was comfortable to talk about almost anything.
T.J. has a therapist/psychologist that he usually goes to because he has girl problems or drama at school or friends, Her name was Georgia. One day he went to go see her and meet a girl named Heidi. Heidi was an African American 5-year-old girl. Georgia asks T.J. to role-play with Heidi, he was supposed to play “bad dad” when they started role-playing he soon found out that she was abused by her step-dad. His name is Rich Marshall who had been an enemy of T.J.’s prior to him abusing Heidi, because of a family matter that had happened.
Eventually Heidi’s family moves into T.J.’s house with his family because of a restraining order against Rich. They were happy and healing. While trying to heal they start to realize that Rich is now stalking the house. While back at school the swim team was getting closer and closer to having their jackets and reaching their goals. By the end of the season everyone except T.J. gets a lettermen jacket because T.J. decided to blow the last meet just to show Mike Barbour that it wasn’t that important to him. Without realizing it while blowing off the last meet he blew the chances of wearing a lettermen jacket.
After awhile the team starts to see that they are really going to miss each other when they aren’t all swimming next year.
So they decided to participate in Hoopfest together, also participating is T.J.’s dad and Mr.Simet. At the end of the festival there was a game that T.J.’s team had to play against Rich’s and Mike’s teams. T.J.’s team won and Rich was very upset about the situation.
Rich decides to get a gun and aims for the five year old little girl, Heidi, misses and ends up shooting T.J.’s dad and killing him. Heidi, who had grown really close to him, was very emotional at the time, same for everyone else.
At the end of the book, Rich gets arrested for the shooting and the abuse and should be in there for a while. Somehow T.J. meets his stepbrother that he has never known about and instantly becomes very close to him, willing to open up and being able to get along with him.
This book meant more to me than words on a paper. This book showed me that honor, honesty, and pride could take you a long way in life. If you don’t honor the people who have got you to where you are then you wont be able to appreciate the people who will get you to where you need to be. Not everyone may have go that out of this book, I don’t know maybe I look at things differently, I over read books. I look past the pages and look at the meaning, the reason Chris Crutcher wrote this
book.