The Cay

The Cay is a 1969 novel by Theodore Taylor

It's WWII and Philip Enright and his mom, Grace, are going back home to Virginia. Philip didn't want to go but with German submarines around Curaçao, his mom insisted. When they're on their way back to the US, the S.S. Hato gets torpedoed and a blinded Philip gets stranded with an elderly guy named Timothy and a cat named Stew Cat. They make their way to an island in the Devil's Mouth region of the Caribbean.

At first, Philip and Timothy don't really get along, as Philip doesn't really have the best view of black people like Timothy.

In 1993, Taylor released Timothy of the Cay, a prequel centered around Timothy.

Tropes used in The Cay include:

• Animal Motifs: Briefly, Philip compares the German submarines' arrival to hungry sharks.
• Bittersweet Ending: Philip (with Stew Cat) is rescued from the Devil's Mouth, eventually, but it's after Timothy succumbed to his injuries from the hurricane and he's left to survive without him. Later, he has surgeries and gets his sight back.
• Book Dumb: Timothy is pretty knowledgeable with fishing, shelter building, and surviving without the usual comforts but he's really fascinated with Philip's knowledge about islands. However, this plays into why he's superstitious, as he never went to school.
• Character Development: Philip really goes through so much in the story between being caught in a shipwreck where he doesn't even know if his mother survived to having his life change completely after going blind. He's prickly and rude to Timothy at first but in time, they form a strong bond. When Timothy dies, Philip must use what he learned from him to eventually survive and soon be able to get rescued, reunited with his parents, and get his sight back.
• Disabled Means Helpless: A blinded Philip relies on Timothy to survive.
• Empathy Pet: Stew Cat plays this role. When Philip starts to cry, Stew Cat comes.
• Flat Character: Philip's parents don't have a lot of characterization to them, besides that Philip Sr. works a lot and Grace is racist, homesick, and overprotective.
• Funetik Aksent: Timothy's accent is written as this. Example...

Timothy: She started dis terrible whar, eh, young bahss?

• Innocent Bigot: Philip had some prejudices towards black people, like Timothy. He, at first, thinks black people are more different than him when he sees Timothy eat a raw fish (seeing that freaks him out), assumes Timothy (and all black people) must be from Africa, is initially disgusted with interacted with Timothy, and calls Timothy "ugly and stupid" at one point. Of course, considering his mother's interactions with people of color and his own lack of interactions with them, it's not hard to see why he has those views.
• Intergenerational Friendship: Philip eventually sheds his bigotry and truly enjoys Timothy's company. Even after his rescue, he prefers to spend time with people who had also known Timothy, as he feels closer to them.
• Morality Pet: Wanting to keep Stew Cat around rather than throw him off the raft like Timothy wanted (he believed the cat was bad luck) is one of our earliest hints that Philip isn't as hateful as he seemed at first glance
• My Beloved Smother: Grace, in comparison to Henrik's mother, is rather overprotective.

My mother was always afraid I'd fall off the sea wall, or tumble out of a tree, or cut myself with a pocketknife. Henrik's mother wasn't that way. She laughed a lot. She said, "Boys, boys, boys."

• Nice Guy: As Philip does learn, Timothy's a pretty good guy and, while he's stern, he's certainly patient with Philip's initial bigotry.
• Parental Abandonment: Timothy doesn't remember his parents, just a woman called "Hannah Gumbs". We learn in Timothy of the Cay that he was abandoned as a baby.
• When You Coming Home, Dad?: Philip used to spend a lot of time with his dad, Philip Sr, but, WWII in full swing, the latter is always busy, even on Sunday.

Philip: I'm sorry, guy, I have to work.

• Vague Age: We don't know exactly how old Timothy is (and he doesn't know either) but he's called "old". In Timothy of the Cay, he does a lot of guessing as to how old he exactly he is. This plays into his advantage when it comes to getting jobs.