81 pages • 2 hours read
Freak the Mighty
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Chapters 1-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “The Unvanquished Truth”
Max, the narrator, introduces himself and his friend Freak. Max isn’t much of a student, but he’s big, and Freak is really smart, and they become friends. Max says this story is, as Freak would put it, the “unvanquished truth.”
As a boy in daycare, Max has a temper and kicks at anyone who tries to touch him “because I knew what a rotten lie that hug stuff was” (2). At daycare he first meets Freak, who wears on his legs steel braces that Max admires. Freak walks around making “rrr” noises like he’s a robot on mechanical legs. Max never kicks at Freak.
By third grade, people call him “Mad Max” or “Max Factor.” His grandparents, Grim and Gram, with whom he lives, call him Maxwell. Max’s mom was Grim’s daughter; Grim only refers to Max’s dad as “Him,” as if he were a monster. Grim worries because, as Max gets older, he more and more resembles “Him” and might someday become like his father.
The summer before eighth grade, Max has a growth spurt, and Freak, “the weirdo robot boy with his white-yellow hair and his weird fierce eyes” moves with his mom, “the Fair Gwen of Air,” to a duplex just down the block (4).
Chapter 2 Summary: “Up from the Down Under”
Max lives in his grandparents’ basement; he calls it the “down under.” It’s neglected and smelly, but it’s a place where Gram doesn’t bother him and Grim is less scared of him. One day early in July, Max is bored in the backyard when the movers arrive down the street. A woman who looks like a movie star is moving in, and with her is Freak in his braces “giving orders” to the movers. Max remembers recognizes woman from daycare as Freak’s mom.
Max walks over to watch. Freak has a regular head but a really short body and a puffed-out chest. He notices Max across the street and demands that he identify himself. Max is too stunned to answer; Freak points a crutch at him, pretends to pull a trigger, and cries, “Then die, earthling, die!” (9). Max runs away.
Chapter 3 Summary: “American Flyer”
Back in his basement, Max feels embarrassed that he was scared by a little guy like Freak. The cellar walls seem to close in on him; he goes upstairs and outside. He sees Freak standing in his backyard, waving a crutch at a tree. Frustrated, Freak drops his crutches, crawls rapidly on his hands and knees toward his house, and then drags a red American Flyer kid’s wagon across the yard to the tree. Freak stands up on the wagon and uses his crutch to whack at the branches.
Max realizes Freak is trying to extract something from the tree. It’s small and multi-colored. Max walks over to Freak’s yard; Freak raises a crutch to strike Max, but the big boy sidesteps him and pulls the colored thing from the tree. It’s light and flimsy and shaped like a bird. Max asks, “You want this back or what?” Freak says, “Oh, it talks” (12). Max hands the toy to Freak and asks what it is. Freak replies that it’s an “ornithopter.” He defines it carefully then says simply that it’s a “mechanical bird.” Max is impressed at how smart Freak sounds.
Freak winds up the ornithopter’s elastic band and lets it go. It flies like a bird. Max chases it, retrieves it, and brings it back. They do this for an hour until the elastic band breaks. Freak says simply that mechanical devices require “periodic maintenance.” He asks Max where he lives; Max points, then grabs the wagon handle and pulls Freak to his house. Freak looks happy.
Chapter 4 Summary: “What Frightened the Fair Gwen”
Max shows Freak his basement room. Freak climbs down the stairs, huffing and puffing with the effort. He’s impressed that Max has the basement all to himself. Max tells him he eats upstairs with Grim and Gram; Freak at once deduces that Gram is his grandmother and Grim is named for his grim attitude. Freak uses fancy words like “sobriquet” and “demeanor,” but Max discovers that he can figure out some of those words in context.
Freak mentions his mom and calls her “Fair Gwen of Air” (16). Max asks why, and Freak says it’s a play on “Fair Guinevere” from the King Arthur legend. Freak explains that King Arthur started out as a “wimpy kid” who pulls a sword, Excalibur, no one else could budge from a stone, and he becomes the first king of England. Guinevere is his queen. Arthur and his knights go on quests and slay dragons and evil men. Max finds that Freak is a colorful, enthusiastic talker.
The thing Freak likes about knights is their armor. People are vulnerable to bullets and hot stoves; Arthur had his men wear metal plating and “programmed them” to go on quests, much as people today program robots. Max says robots only exist in movies; Freak gets angry, calms himself, then explains that millions of robots already exist, though most do specific tasks and don’t look like movie robots. Max says he saw one of those on TV; Freak retorts, “Television, the opiate of the massives” (19). He admits that he watches TV—Star Trek, among other shows—but also reads lots of books: “Books are like truth serum — if you don’t read, you can’t figure out what’s real” (19).
Outside, the Fair Gwen calls for “Kevin.” Max opens the bulkhead at the top of the stairs and climbs out; Gwen looks terrified. Freak climbs up, and Gwen grabs him, puts him in the wagon, and drags him back home. Clearly, Gwen is afraid of Max.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Spitting Image”
Max crawls under his bed, where it’s cool and dark and his mind can just float like a cloud. He’s interrupted by Gram, who says Gwen called to apologize; she’s “delighted” that he and Kevin will be friends, and invites Max to dinner. Gram mentions that she and Gwen were friends and that he and Kevin were in daycare together. Max shrugs, not letting on that he knows.
At first Max is reluctant to go to the dinner; he feels a fist tightening in his stomach. Gram says, “You don’t have to go, but it would be the right thing to do” (24). Dinner at Gwen and Freak’s turns out to be ok. Gwen gushes with enthusiasm and talks in a rush. She mentions her friendship with Gram and how she didn’t like Max’s father. Freak says, “Hey, Gwen, leave the guy alone, huh? You’re going spastic” (25). While it’s no secret that Max’s dad is in prison, as he gets older and bigger, people act like it should be hushed up.
Supper is delicious; Gwen is a great cook. They sit out back and eat from paper plates, potato salad and hot dogs done just right. Freak tells funny robots stories until Max is choking with laughter. Finally he spits up a “yucky mess” but laughs till his nose runs.
Max returns home and flops down on his bed. He begins to cry and can’t stop, but he’s happy.
Chapters 1-5 Analysis
In the first five chapters, Max introduces himself and Kevin—“Freak”—and describes how they became friends. Each boy is different, and each suffers a lot of rejection from other people because of it. Somehow they’re a good match for each other.
Max is very large for his age—his name symbolizes his size—and he looks a lot like his father, a dangerous criminal who’s currently in prison. People fear Max and tend to avoid him; even his grandparents are nervous around him. As a result, Max is shy and spends a lot of time alone in his room in the basement, a subterranean world that represents Max’s low self-esteem. It is also suggested that Max also has a learning disability—it might be dyslexia, which would make it hard for him to read—and he thinks he’s not smart.
However, Max is intelligent and observant, even if he doesn’t realize it. He’s good at reading people. He understands that Gram’s fumbling attempts to communicate with him reveal her fear of him, and that Gwen is overjoyed that Max and her son are friends because Kevin has no friends. Max also notices how men often socialize on holidays by drinking alcohol; he doesn’t like this and perceives it as a sign that men don’t really know how to get along with others.
Despite his shyness, one day Max does something new that even he doesn’t expect: He walks over to a neighbor and meets him. That someone is Freak; Max is willing to try this because Freak isn’t really a stranger but a person Max met earlier in his life at a daycare center. He remembers liking Freak back then; maybe it was because Freak was different, with his crutches and high energy, and Max felt different, too, burdened by the terrible memory of his mother’s death and his resulting sensitivity to being touched.
Max is drawn to Freak for two main reasons: He admires the boy’s intelligence, and he respects Freak’s fearlessness. Max wishes he had more of these traits himself. When Max calls Kevin “Freak,” it’s not an insult. Everyone calls him that, and Kevin adopts the name as if it’s an honored label for a gallant knight or a superhero. He has a knack for turning things to his advantage.
Freak has Morquio syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that prevents his body from recycling a certain chemical, keratan sulfate, which builds up in the cells and prevents his bones from growing properly. His head is normal in size but his arms and legs stay undeveloped, and his rib cage can’t keep up with his internal organs’ growth, which makes it hard for him to breathe. This is why he huffs and puffs when going up or down stairs.
Freak loves robots because they have invulnerable mechanical bodies. He’s also interested in medieval knights, in part because they wear protective body armor. He wants to replace his body with a robotic one that’s large and strong. Freak learns everything he can that might help him reach his goal; as a result, he knows a lot about many subjects, and his intelligence has grown beyond that of a normal 12-year-old. Freak is as smart as Max is huge.
Freak likes to show off his wide knowledge; it’s a way of making up for his physical impairment. He ridicules Max’s TV habit by calling television “the opiate of the massives” (19). He’s teasing Max for being one of the millions of big, dumb guys who have nothing better to do than stare at a TV screen. Freak deliberately misquotes Karl Marx, a 19th-century political philosopher who famously asserted that “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” Marx believed people use religion to numb the pain of life; Freak transfers that to TV watching. It’s a clever joke, but it might insult Max. Instead, he’s used to the idea that he’s not very smart, and he’s fascinated by Freak’s wide range of knowledge.
Freak admits that he, too, watches a lot of TV—lonely kids often do so—but he excuses himself by reading “tons of books” (19), as if reading were an antidote to the dumbing-down effects of television. That Freak is aware of TV’s influence on the human mind speaks well of his wide-ranging understanding of people and society. Freak has developed his own mental superpowers, and Max wants some of that. Besides, Freak is fun to hang out with.
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