Guts: The True Stories Behind Hatchet and the Brian Books

These chapters offer a continuation of the structure established in Chapter 1, where thematically-organized chapters correlate events from Paulsen’s life to events in Hatchet, showing how Paulsen’s experiences informed the novel’s plot, characterization, and conflict. In these chapters, experiences from Paulsen’s childhood appear in near replica form in Hatchet, while experiences from Paulsen’s adulthood merely inform the setting and scenarios of the novel. The line between fiction and fact is blurred as the storyteller becomes the subject of his fiction. In this specific form of memoir, Paulsen and his character, Brian, are discussed at length—including their similarities and differences, and all the ways they overlap and inform one another.

Paulsen’s lived childhood experiences and the drama in the novel are nearly identical at times. Brian’s character being so heavily influenced by Paulsen, to the degree of identical scenarios and thoughts, creates a unique narrative in Hatchet and the Brian books. Guts was written in response to fan questions about Paulsen’s personal experiences and how they relate to Brian’s experiences in the novel; however, these questions were not simply reader curiously, but rather a desire to fully understand such a unique character and how such a character may present in reality. Paulsen, at 12, is out hunting grouse when he hears a deafening noise and turns. “I just saw brown. I saw big. I saw death coming at me, snorting and thundering” (Guts: 34). Nearly identically, in Chapter 16 of Hatchet the protagonist, “saw a brown wall of fur detach itself from the forest to his rear and come down on him like a runaway truck” (Hatchet: 150). His interpretation of the moose attack in his childhood appears, likewise, in Brian’s assessment of the moose that attacks him. Paulsen writes: “I have never seen anything rivaling the madness that seems to infect a large portion of the moose family” (Guts: 30). He describes how the moose charges past him and attacks a tree: “In that bull’s mind maybe the tree had done something to insult him, or gotten in his way, or called him out, because he absolutely destroyed that tree” (Guts: 36). Similarly, Brian senses the “madness” in the moose in Hatchet: “She took him in the left side of the back with her forehead, took him and threw him out into the water and then came after him to finish the job…Insane, he thought. Just that, the word, insane” (Hatchet: 150). Brian’s fictional experience is a direct copy of Paulsen’s, with the same interpretation and conclusions drawn from the events.

In contrast to the harrowing events from Paulsen’s childhood, dramatic events from his adulthood are not worked directly into the plot of Hatchet. Discussion of these events separates Paulsen from his fictional character, clarifying for readers where this distinction lies. Because the adult version of Paulsen is wiser and more prepared to face the wilderness and its many dangers, his reactions do not offer source material for his middle-grade protagonist. “I know we are supposed to temper judgement with wisdom and logic,” he writes of a near-lethal moose attack in his adulthood. But offered the chance for retribution, Paulsen admits he would “grab a rifle and go for it” (Guts: 49). In Hatchet, Paulsen describes the moose attack form his adulthood but concludes the event with his childhood reaction to an earlier defused event. He walks away injured, ego-bruised, and confused: “So insane…such an insane attack for no reason” (Hatchet: 153). Adult Paulsen offers a plausible explanation for the inexplicable moods of the moose in the form of a water-borne parasite, “that attacks the brain and can cause madness” (Guts: 36). Brian, stranded and without the knowledge or context to rationalize the moose attack, falls asleep thinking about the irrationality of the attack.

These chapters offer Paulsen’s first philosophical argument about man’s interaction with, reliance on, and endangerment from the wilderness. He begins by showing how irrational animals can be through several stories about wild moose attacks. There is a gap, Paulsen shows, between human logic and moose logic, and as such there can be no understanding no matter how much a moose is observed. To Paulsen, the moose is an unknowable part of the wild. However, the moose represent an outlier because many tragedies in nature can be avoided with knowledge. “We have grown away from knowledge, away from knowing what something is really like, towards knowing only what somebody else says it is like” (Guts: 52). He describes several gruesome animal attacks, beginning with a little boy’s death by an agitated white-tailed deer, to several survival calamities spurred from insects, to the large number of trappers killed by malnutrition and illness. Finally, Paulsen concludes the section with a solution to the pointless deaths he has witnessed or heard about. While moose may exist outside of logic, “the solution to facing all these dangers, a solution that came very rapidly to me and to Brian, is knowledge” (Guts: 65). The Value of Inherited and Invented Knowledge is a throughline in the book, a strong personal belief of Paulsen’s that understanding nature in a deep, connected way is the difference between survival and death, but also between happiness and dissatisfaction with life.