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...

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…