Johnny Tremain Character Analysis

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Character Analysis Johnny Tremain Johnny Tremain is a fourteen-year old boy living in Boston. In the beginning of the book Johnny is rude, inpatient, cruel, and self-centered. Johnny is a talented young silversmith, also he is well educated. His rudeness may come from his lack of a loving family; his parents died while he was still at a young age. Johnny works as a silversmith with the Laphams, training for the day where he will take up the shop. People think of Johnny as a servant, but he acts like a tyrant, bossing around not only the other boys in the house, but Mr. Lapham’s own granddaughters. Johnny’s bad treatment of others leads to annoyance, and this annoyance leads to a damaging accident that wrecks Johnny’s future as a silversmith. The outcome of this accident is a crippled hand. With a crippled hand, Johnny cannot find sufficient work and he allows himself to feel sorrowful. Almost giving up all his hope, Johnny almost commits a crime. Yet, with his new job with the Boston Observer, the Whig newspaper, and his friendship with Rab, the Lornes, and the leaders of the revolution, Johnny takes a more truthful path. Inspired by their generosity and dignity, Johnny finds himself changing from a selfish boy into a dedicated man. On a conscious level, he models himself after his new best friend, Rab, trying to copy Rab’s quiet, meek confidence and mild temperament. Unconsciously, as Johnny is engrossed in books at the Lornes’ library and submerges in the rhetoric of such acquaintances as Samuel Adams and James Otis, he begins to care about something much bigger than his own comfort. Johnny suddenly becomes a member of the Whigs and a soldier. Johnny is less concerned about whether he will be able to become a silversmith than whether he will be able to fire a gun and serve his

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