Forrest Gump by Winston Groom: Disability, Identity & Irony

Introduction: Book vs. Film

"Bein' an idiot is no box of chocolates," but "at least I ain't led no hum-drum life," says Forrest Gump to the reader. This quotation aptly illustrates the appreciable, though subtle, difference between the famous film and the novel by Winston Groom that inspired its cinematic incarnation. As portrayed on screen, Forrest Gump is slow in mind but not in body, and 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 film, Groom's Gump is a large, hulking boy — excellent at football but not particularly strong at school. 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. 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 a supposed feeble intellect.

Gump's Disability and the Nature of Intellect

The disability as portrayed in the book might be described as intellectual disability. Gump's condition is called, as was common in the language of his day, "slowness" by those who are kind, and "idiocy" by those not apt to mince their words. But Groom seems to suggest that the true nature of intellect exists only in the mind of the perceiver. By being forced to see the world in the 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.

Perception, Mental Illness, and Neurodiversity

This emphasis on disability as something 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 intellectual disability but also for conditions such as autism. Autistic individuals, for instance, may be brilliantly gifted in singular pursuits, just as Gump triumphs as a runner, a football star, and a champion ping-pong player. Autistic individuals may not feel connections to others in the same way most people do, but that does not mean their way of perceiving the world is wrong, or that they have no means of connecting with others.