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
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