Character Analysis
Gerry is the youngest Byron brother and—real talk—he spends most of the book crying about whatever's going wrong that day.
(Not that we're judging the poor guy. After all, he's only five. We spent most of the day making pillow forts and watching Sesame Street when we were five—five-year-olds aren't generally the most useful folks to have around in a crisis.)
Like Linus, you'll never find Gerry without his security blanket, a.k.a. Blankie. (See: "Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory.") He almost drowns trying to "rescue" it, and he drags that thing from one end of the deserted island to the other. By the end of the story, he hasn't given it up. (That's true love.)
We do watch him grow up in other ways, though. Gerry doesn't have as much of a presence in the novel as his big brothers, but there are moments in which we can clearly see a newfound maturity. At the beginning of the book, Gerry's afraid of the water; by the end, he's taught himself to swim (albeit poorly). On the island, he catches the first fish and helps Dylan save Ben from a shark attack.
At the end of the day, though, he's just a little boy who's happy to be reunited with his daddy…and probably also happy to get to snuggle with a freshly-washed Blankie. (We're guessing that rag got pretty smelly on the island.)