Plot
The novel opens with the family in the hold of a sailing ship, weathering a great storm. The ship runs aground on a reef, and the family learns the ship's crew has taken to a lifeboat and abandoned them. Subsequent searches for the crew yield no trace.
The ship survives the night as the storm abates, and the family finds themselves within sight of a tropical island. The ship's cargo of livestock, dogs, guns & powder, carpentry tools, books, a disassembled pinnace, and provisions have survived. The family builds a raft, lashes livestock and the most valuable supplies to it, and paddles to the island, where they set up a temporary shelter.
Over the next few weeks they make several expeditions back to the ship, to empty its hold, and harvest rigging, planks, and sails. They construct a small homestead on the island, and the ship's hull eventually breaks up in a storm and founders.
The middle of the book is a series of vignettes, covering several years. The father and older boys explore various environments about the island, discover various (improbable) plants and animals, and build a large tree house, complete with a library. They also use the carpentry tools and local resources to build mechanical contraptions.
Eventually, sailing the pinnace around the island's coast, they discover a European family hiding from local pirates. They adopt their daughter (who at first masquerades as a boy), and her father returns on a rescue mission, restoring the family's contact to the outside world.
Read more about this topic: The Swiss Family Robinson
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“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.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)