preview

Character Analysis Of Jack In This Boy's Life

Decent Essays

Sadly, Jack in This Boy’s Life nurtures his personality and ignores his character development. Throughout Jack’s life, he seamlessly continues to focus on personality and popularity rather than developing rich character values. Jack continues to build up an obnoxious, outlaw, untrustworthy type of personality which will not take him very far in life. Jack doesn’t realize that being popular in school will not last his whole life nor that in order to succeed, a strong character foundation is needed. Character can support someone for an entire lifetime, however, personality can only take someone so far. Jack’s outlaw personality is portrayed when he says, “We became self-important, cocksure, insane in our arrogance. We broke windows. We broke streetlights” (61). These actions distinctively reflect Jack’s outlaw personality, and show the level of Jack’s un-profound character. Jack simply doesn’t understand the importance of character and why it is superior to personality. Character is easy to build when one has someone to look up to that can act as a role model. Unfortunately, Jack lacked a mentor to guide him in his development from boy to man. Someone who could watch out over him, make sure he was developing character, and show Jack what a good citizen looks like. Jack would have benefitted greatly from the presence of someone who could have put him on the right track. Most people’s role model are their mothers; However, Jack’s mother was distracted by the presence of Dwight.

Get Access