Forrest Gump

Forrest Gump identifies himself as being an idiot of a low IQ of seventy. His homeland is Alabama. Forrest remembers being placed in school for retards where he met Jenny whom they engaged in an unlucky relationship.   Forrest owing to his muscular body is recruited to play as a football player and afterwards manages to acquire a football scholarship in the University of Alabama. There he crosses paths with Jenny again, Forrest’s friend Bubba offers him a lotion, which turns him into a virtuoso performer, and he plays in Jenny’s band. Later, Forrest drops out of school and goes ends up in Vietnam in the late 1960s, where he also meets Bubba. They later agreed to engage in the shrimp trade after dropping out of the army, however, Bubba gets killed in war. Forrest catches a bullet in the ass and is forced to spend a lot of time in the Army sanatorium playing the ping-pong game. Later he receives an honor’s Congressional medal at the Whitehouse. Then Forrest is selected to represent the country against China in a ping-pong game. Whilst in China Forrest saved a Mao from drowning and yet again met Jenny who is a member of a rock band. Later Forrest’s odyssey moves him in NASA and afterwards in space. At this point Groom’s account is   evidently out of control, in fact, Forrest admit that life is a chain of happenings that lack an underlying principle (Groom & Escott, 2001).

Groom’s narrative is a satirical. This narrative is destined to be funny whilst introducing fundamental truths. Forrest’s language is informal; country slang, this indicates that he is a simple man. Forrest shares a spacecraft along with a lady astronaut and it lands in the midst of a jungle. Both of them are enslaved by cannibals and enforced to cultivate cotton. Later they are rescued however, the woman astronaut opts to stay behind since she has “jigaboo” lover. Forrest come back to the Whitehouse and encounters a paranoid man known as Richard Nixon. Forrest finds out that Jenny works in Indianapolis in a tire firm. Groom’s narrative is now bolder as it progresses. Forrest’s life is ever evolving and he decides to become a wrestler, Jenny seeing this leaves him since she hates it. In the course of the narrative Jenny and Forrest lives are seen to be coming together and breaking very many times, they have not had a stable relationship. Forrest afterwards joins Hollywood and was involved in the performance of the “The Creature from the Black Lagoon” film (Groom & Escott, 2001).

The narrative depicts several themes; the theme of racial discrimination is indicated when Forrest makes claims of accepting blacks on all terms, however, speaks innocently mimicking the loaded nicknames that he claims he hears others utilizing. Additionally, racial discrimination is evident since the football team Forrest plays for is comprised of all whites and they find it daunting to face the integrated Northern teams (Groom & Escott, 2001). A second theme is chance and destiny. In this theme, Forrest at the beginning is addressing questions regarding destiny and at the end, he speaks to the beloved ones’ graves and wonders if humans have a destiny. The theme death being a component is depicted in the fact that most of the Forrest’s beloved ones die in the course of the story. Forrest struggles by seeing them die in war and others during war.

References

Groom, W., & Escott, J. (2001). Forest Gump. Harlow, Essex: Pearson Education.