Sounder

Sounder is a Young Adult novel by William Armstrong, published in 1969. Winner of the Newbery Award, the book purposefully omits most proper names of people and places in order to unchain its narrative and characters from a specific time and place.

The story begins with a young boy asking his father where he got their dog, Sounder. The father responds that the dog came to him. The boy speculates he and the dog must be about the same age, and reflects on his failed efforts to attend school despite the long distance required to walk through the worsening winter weather. He concludes that the next year he will be older and thus stronger and better able to attend school.

Sounder is named because of his incredibly loud bark, which can be heard a long way off. Sounder is ugly, but is a very skilled hunting dog. The family depends on the animal hides from the hunts that the boy and Sounder regularly go on. The father promises the boy that he will take him hunting. They have a meager dinner, and while the boy helps his mother shell walnuts, the father leaves. The mother reads from the bible, and the boy goes to sleep wondering where his father has gone. In the morning, he wakes up to find pork sausages and ham cooking. These are special-occasion foods, and he wonders where they got them from. Breakfast is joyful.



Later, the sheriff arrives with two deputies. They enter the cabin and arrest the father, accusing him of having stolen the ham. As they drag the father away, Sounder chases after them, barking, and one of the deputies shoots at the dog. Sounder runs away. The boy goes looking for Sounder, but only finds a trail of blood and part of the dog’s ear. He brings the ear home and places it under his pillow. He worries over the dog and wishes for the dog to come back.

Although his mother believes Sounder went somewhere to die in peace, the boy keeps looking for the dog every day. The boy must watch his younger siblings while his mother shells walnuts in order to make money, and he begins to find their tiny cabin lonely and oppressive.

As Christmas approaches, the mother bakes a cake and sends the boy to the jail with it to see his father. The boy is self-conscious as he walks through town. The guards at the jail are mean and disrespectful, and make him wait for hours to see his father. They also smash up the cake, but the boy takes it to his father anyway. The father is distant and unhappy. The boy tells him that he believes Sounder is alive. When the visit is over, the father tells the boy not to come back.



The next morning the boy wakes up and finds Sounder outside. Sounder is in bad shape;  he has lost an eye, an ear, and one leg is lame. The boy and the mother take Sounder in and treat his wounds.

The family hears that the father has been convicted of theft and sentenced to a chain gang. The boy decides he will follow his father as the gang moves around the state, and begins searching for convicts. When he finally locates a chain gang, he watches them for some time, looking for his father, but one of the guards chases him off, making his hands bleed.

The boy goes to a school and attempts to wash his hands. He finds a book in the garbage and takes it to the water cistern. He’s found by an elderly teacher, who takes him inside and cleans his wounded hands. The teacher asks how he was hurt and the boy tells him the story of his father, and the teacher is moved. He offers to let the boy live with him and he will teach him to read and write. The mother sadly gives her permission, seeing this as the best opportunity the boy will have, and he goes to live with the teacher during the cold weather months, working in the fields as usual in the summer.



One day while the boy is at the cabin, his father appears. He has been badly injured in an explosion at some point, but he is alive and has made it back to his family. Sounder is excited to see him as well. A few nights later, the father takes Sounder with him hunting at night. A few hours later Sounder returns alone, and the boy goes looking for his father. He finds him dead. Later, Sounder crawls under the cabin’s porch and refuses to come out, and soon dies as well.

The boy is sad about both deaths, but is also gratified that he has achieved one of his dearest goals: learning to read and write.