Plot
The story takes place in Radnor, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia. The story is told from the point of view of Jill, a girl in Mrs. Minish's fifth-grade class. Wendy, the smart and popular class president, leads her classmates, including Jill, in bullying a chubby, plain-faced girl named Linda Fischer.
Though the entire class ostracizes Linda ("Blubber"), Wendy and her best friend and sidekick Caroline are Linda's chief tormentors and bully her both physically (e.g. attempting to strip her in the girls' bathroom) and psychologically (forcing her to say things such as "I am Blubber, the Smelly Whale of Class 206"). Linda confronts Jill and threatens her with revenge after one incident, but Jill dismisses the threat.
Jill and Tracy pull a prank on their grouchy neighbor, Mr. Machinist, on Halloween, by stuffing raw rotten eggs into his mailbox, but are later identified from a photo taken by Mr. Machinist and are made to rake his leaves as punishment. While raking, Jill and Tracy find they need to use the restroom. They pee all over Mr. Machinist's trees as a sort of payback.
Remembering Linda's threat, Jill suspects that "Blubber" was the one who tattled on her and Tracy; Tracy, however, suspects Wendy and Caroline, which infuriates Wendy. To appease Wendy, Jill suggests that the class hold a mock trial for Linda (with Wendy, naturally, as judge, and a jury made up of several classmates). To this suggestion, Tracy remarks that she thinks Jill is scared of Wendy. Jill soon realizes that Tracy is right.
The "trial" falls apart when Wendy, as judge, denies Linda her right to a "lawyer", and Jill, frustrated with herself for so readily following Wendy's lead, finally stands up to Wendy, who also arouses Jill's anger by making a racial slur against Tracy (who is Chinese-indian). Wendy, furious that Jill has dared to question her authority, threatens to make Jill "sorry ever born".
Jill comes to school the next morning to find that Wendy has made good on her threat and turned the entire class against her, tagging her with the nickname "B. B." (short for "Baby Brenner"). Jill's tormentors include Linda, who is more than willing to bully one of her former harassers.
Jill figures out that she can be stronger by playing into the jokes. However, when she tries to laugh at their taunting too, the kids even use that to make fun of her. So instead, Jill goes further to fight against the bullying by pitting Wendy, Linda, and Wendy's best friend Caroline against each other, telling Caroline that she is no longer Wendy's best friend, that Linda has taken her place. When Linda affirms this, Caroline is hurt and Wendy is furious at Linda. Jill makes friends with Rochelle, a quiet girl in the class who had never participated in the bullying.
By the end, although the class atmosphere is tense, no one is getting singled out or picked on. Jill comments (the book is in a first-person narrative) on how the friendships in the class have changed completely in the classroom but how Tracy is a friend she can always count on having.
Read more about this topic: Blubber (novel)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
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“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
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