Like Daniel Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Scott O’Dell’s
Island of the Blue Dolphins (1960), William Steig’s
Abel’s Island takes on the challenges of the survival story. The protagonist’s isolation throughout most of the novel prevents reliance on the standard narrative building blocks of dialogue and character interaction. Instead, Steig makes his mouse hero’s solitary musings and his conflicts both with nature and himself the central focus.
One afternoon in August, 1907, newlyweds Abel and Amanda leave their comfortable home in Mossville for a picnic outing. When a violent storm arises, they find shelter in a cave until Abel recklessly pursues Amanda’s windblown scarf. Buffeted by torrential rains, Abel clutches desperately at a rusty nail in a board until this makeshift raft comes to rest in the branches of a birch tree on a small
river island.
At first, Abel believes his family will mount a search party to rescue him. When he realizes that he must save himself, he makes many ingenious but unsuccessful attempts at escape: adapting a rudder to his nail-and-board boat, engineering another boat of driftwood and bark, lashing together twigs to make a catamaran, flinging a woven grass rope across the river with his suspenders as a slingshot, and building a bridge of stepping stones.
By September, Abel accepts that he is an inhabitant of the island and takes pride in providing for his needs. He experiments with different natural foods and outfits a hollow log as a snug shelter. As autumn deepens, he diligently stores nuts and seeds, weaves a
winter cloak of grass stuffed with milkweed fluff, and insulates his log home. The energy of nature as it prepares for winter spurs him to even greater creativity, and he tries his hand at sculpting clay statues of Amanda and his family. In further exploration of the island, he discovers a human-sized pocket watch and a novel, giving him the rhythmic ticking of the watch and daily-rationed reading of chapters.
The winter months Abel spends miserably in the darkness of his log, waking only long enough to munch a little in his food stores. The depression of this dark time is made worse by the freezing cold and by a predatory owl who returns several times to threaten Abel.
The return of spring is marked not only by a resurgence of energy and joyfulness in Abel but also, amazingly, by the arrival of a visitor, an elderly frog named Gower Glackens who is washed ashore by the rain-choked river. Mouse and frog become fast friends, sharing stories of their families and artistic interests. Abel honors his friend by adding a sculpted likeness of Gower to his collection, and Gower assures Abel that sculpting is surely his vocation.
When Gower leaves the island in mid-June, Abel is more lonely than before. In August, a full year after landing on the island, the drought-diminished river convinces Abel that he now has a chance of crossing it safely. Saying a loving farewell to his statues and to the island that nurtured him, he begins to swim across the stream. Once on shore, an encounter with a cat gives him another chance to prove the survival skills and self-confidence that he has lately acquired. Making his way through Mossville, he spots Amanda sitting alone in a park but decides to continue on and surprise her alone at home. She enters, spots first her restored scarf and then her husband, then melts tearfully into his arms. Steig’s own ink-and-wash illustrations, which have enriched the narrative throughout, are used here instead of words to recount the final touching moments of this tale.