Book Analysis on Jo's Boys

Louisa May Alcott, Jo's Boys Jo's Boys by Louisa May Alcott is an episodic novel, which means it does not have a consistent protagonist running through the entire book. However, any reader asked to nominate a main character in the novel would probably select Dan, simply because his character is the most broadly dramatic in terms of incident and action.

Dan has a complicated and dark character which changes over the course of the novel, which allows him in various episodes to demonstrate traits both good and bad: he is loyal and loving, but also troubled and ultimately violent. I will examine the dramatic arc of Dan's character, and examine the specific traits that mark each stage of his journey over the course of Alcott's novel.

Before discussing Dan's role at the start of Jo's Boys, it is worth noting that Jo's Boys is, in fact, a sequel to Alcott's Little Men, which depicted Jo March (the protagonist of Alcott's previous bestseller Little Women) in marriage to Professor Bhaer, running a boys' school. Dan is one of a number of classmates depicted as children in Little Men, and Alcott seems to expect us to remember the glimpses of his childhood self, where he is depicted as largely undisciplined, given to obstreperous outbursts.

In other words, from her earlier childhood depiction of Dan, Alcott seems to have known that self-control and temper would be problems for him. But when we first meet him as a young adult in Jo's Boys, he stands in marked contrast to his other classmates (some of whom are in college or already in business) when he follows Horace Greeley's famous advice to "go West, young man, go West" and goes off to seek his fortune amid the boomtowns of the vast unincorporated territories of the American frontier.

Chapter One begins by emphasizing Dan's peripatetic nature as his chief trait: we are told that "Dan was a wanderer still; for after the geological researches in South America he tried sheep-farming in Australia, and was now in California looking up mines." (p3). Later in the chapter, the now-aged Meg speculates about Dan's peripatetic nature, saying "I want to see Dan settled somewhere.

'A rolling stone gathers no moss,' and at twenty-five he is still roaming the world without a tie to hold him" but Jo ("always ready to defend the black sheep of her flock" as Alcott states) claims that "Dan will find his place at last, and experience is his best teacher. He is rough still but each time he comes home I see a change for the better, and never lose my faith in him.

He may never do anything great, or get rich, but if the wild boy makes an honest man, I'm satisfied." (p.11) I think this establishes Dan's basic traits before the events of the novel witness the development that Jo herself has predicted. Chapter Four begins with Jo's speculations that Dan might have had Indian blood, because of his wandering nature. But here the peripatetic trait soon indicates a deeper psychological complexity: Dan's essentially solitary nature, which is tortured by its own solitude.

Dan expresses this in a number of ways when he returns in Chapter Four, among them stating his belief that he will never be married because "women like a steady-going man: I shall never be that" (p45), although he bolsters Jo's wilder speculations by asking her "What should you say if I brought you an Indian squaw?" (p 46).

But soon he delights all the assembled household with his stories of his encounters with "the Dakotas, and other tribes of the northwest," where it seems he was respected and trusted by the Indians. However it is here that Alcott indicates that "no one dreamed how much was to happen before Dan" would return to the household again, and foreshadows the more melodramatic turn his story will take.

The melodrama consists of Dan ultimately going to prison for murder, as related in Chapter Twelve, when he defends a friend Blair, who is being cheated while gambling.

This is where Dan attains an astonishing amount of depth, as after the murder (conducted for reasons of honor, and out of a sort of naivete and romantic ideal of male friendship) when he claims "It's all over with me; I've spoilt my life" and Alcott describes him as "brood[ing] over his ruined life" and "[giving] up all his happy hopes." But Dan has a crisis of conscience in prison in which.