Forest Gump by Winston Groom

Forest Gump Groom, Winston. Forrest Gump. 1994. Bein' an idiot is no box of chocolates," but "at least I ain't led no hum-drum life," says Forest Gump to the reader. This quotation aptly illustrates the appreciable, though subtle difference between the more famous movie of the book and the text by Winston Groom that inspired its cinematic incarnation. As portrayed in film, Forrest Gump is 'slow' in mind but not in body.

However, his disability does not limit his ability to experience the events of history in a full and visceral manner. Unlike the image one might have from the screen, Groom's Gump is a large, hulking boy, excellent at football but not particularly strong at school. However, because of his refusal to abstain from living life, and his willingness to tolerate and accept other people, his existence takes him through all of the major conflicts of America, from playing football at a down-home college, to Vietnam, to harvesting shrimp.

However, rather than innocently offering others chocolates, the prose Gump has a more ironic take on his life. So long as things aren't hum-drum, he suggests, and you take what life gives you with fortitude and grit, there is no need to be ashamed of your supposed feeble intellect The disability, as portrayed in the book, might be said to be mental retardation.

Gump's illness is called, as was common in the language of Gump's day, slowness by those who are kind and idiocy by those who are not apt to mince their words. But Groom seems to suggest that the true nature of the intellect is only in the mind of the perceiver. By being forced to see the world in first person, through Gump's eyes, the reader cannot really see Gump as 'specially challenged' or intellectually disabled at all.

Gump simply offers a different view of the world than how others see it, and sometimes a far saner point-of-view than many of those near and dear to him. This stress upon illness as something that is perceptual, in the sense that the mentally ill or disabled simply see and learn things differently than most other individuals, rather than more imperfectly, has profound implications, not just for mental retardation, but also for mental illnesses such as autism.

Autistic individuals, for instance, may be brilliantly gifted at singular pursuits, like Gump is as athletics, triumphing as a runner, a football star, and a champion ping-pong player. Autistic individuals do not feel connections to others in the same way that most people do, but that does not mean that their way of perceiving the world is wrong, or that they have no means of connecting with others.

Forest establishes connections and networks with others more profound than many 'normal' people through his physical pursuits, as often the autistic might through numbers or objects. Even physically handicapped individuals like the deaf might relate to the book. After all, the deaf have created their own profound culture and linguistic structure through the methodology of silence, as Gump does through running and ping-pong. Groom wrote the book; no doubt, to show how even a supposed 'idiot' had a more pointed view of the American generational conflicts of the past.

He wishes his readers to view these conflicts from a naive first person narrative of a supposed fool, so as to give the reader a fresh.