The Stranger in the Lifeboat

Introduction

Mitch Albom’s novel The Stranger in the Lifeboat is a story narrated in episodic form that tells two different intersecting stories. Centered on two primary characters—Benjamin “Benji” Kierney, a deckhand onboard the fated ship Galaxy, and Jarty LeFleur, a worn-down police officer with a struggling marriage—the story tells the tale of Benji’s survival after shipwreck through a series of diary entries, a diary which LeFleur finds more than a year later in the bottom of a lifeboat that washes ashore on his tiny Caribbean island.

Albom began his career as a journalist and shifted to writing books in the late 1980s; his first books covered sports topics (which he had prior experience with in his journalism career), but he quickly shifted to more thematic fiction. Albom is the author of numerous other similar titles, many of which deal with questions about faith, hope, mortality, and the meaning of life—topics that are broached in this novel as well. Published in 2021, The Stranger in the Lifeboat is Albom’s seventh fiction novel, and it instantly became a New York Times bestseller.

This study guide was written using the eBook publication of the first edition, published in 2021.

Plot Summary

The novel opens with an unspecified number of people helping an unnamed young man onto a boat in an unnamed location. The reader becomes quickly aware, however, that this is a life raft in the middle of the ocean carrying the only survivors of a wrecked yacht, and that the stranger they have hauled aboard after drifting in the ocean for three days has introduced himself to the castaways as God.

The story alternates between three perspectives: the story set in the past at sea, narrated by Benji in a diary; the story set in the present, narrated by an omniscient voice and centered on the actions and thoughts of Jarty LeFleur; and finally a series of short, interspersed news reports that begin with a reporter on the doomed yacht and conclude with the reports of the discovered life boat, and, eventually, the revelation of the yacht’s final resting place at the bottom of the sea.

Once the lifeboat group haul the stranger on board, they begin to ask questions about who he is, what he is doing there, who he really is, and why he cannot save them if he is who he says he is. One by one, however, the members of the lifeboat begin to die off, either from their previously sustained injuries or from the vicissitudes of the sea. Meanwhile, the reader discovers they are privy to the events that occurred at sea due to the fact that the character Benji had written everything down in a diary, a diary which is discovered by LeFleur, who is able to read the diary entries over the span of a few days while dealing with the fallout of the discovery of the lifeboat (the boat which had contained the diary).

The people onboard the lifeboat were split between various members of the crew who had been working the yacht during a party, as well as a few of the wealthy and influential guests that had been invited onto the yacht as part of an upscale, invite-only summit for the rich and powerful. During their time lost at sea Benji narrates the events that occur, beginning with the first death of Bernadette, who had been injured in the wreck, all the way to the final deaths of Lambert, the yacht’s owner, who drowns, and Geri, the Olympic swimmer, who is killed by sharks. The final entries of the diary are taken up by Benji’s conversations with the last person to survive apart from himself, the little girl Alice, who the reader discovers is actually the Lord (and had been the whole time).

On land in the present, LeFleur reads the various journal entries and is affected by reading this first-hand account of suffering and death, most especially thanks to his own experience with death. The reader discovers that LeFleur had a daughter who died four years prior to the events in the narrative, and that he is still grieving the tragic loss of his only child. Reading the diary entries, however, allows LeFleur to slowly work through his experience of his daughter’s death, and gives him a fresh start on life, viewing the time he received with his daughter as a gift, rather than remaining focused on all the time he thought he should have had with her.

In the end, it is revealed that Benji survived the voyage across the sea and was the drifter that initially alerted the local police about the presence of the lifeboat in the first place. LeFleur confronts Benji about this fact, and Benji admits that he had left the diary there on purpose for LeFleur to find, hoping that in doing so he would be able to provide an opportunity for someone else to see the meaning in life and death in a similar way as he had.