44 pages • 1 hour read
Craig SilveyJasper Jones
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2009A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Cultural Context: Racism Against Aboriginal People in 1960s Australia
Aboriginal people are rarely mentioned in Jasper Jones, but their status in 1960s Australian society is central to the plot of the novel. There are two groups of Indigenous people in Australia: Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islander people. Jasper is half Aboriginal, and because of that, he is largely shunned by society. Even his own white grandfather believed that his birth would be a stain on the family name. Indigenous people lived in Australia for centuries before European settlers first set foot on the continent, but once the settlers arrived, the Indigenous people were generally treated unfairly, and their land was taken from them. They were not allowed full access into white society, and as such, their markers of commercial success such as employment rates, lifespan, and education were generally less than that of their white counterparts. This lack of equality becomes apparent in the novel when Jasper Jones is called a “half-caste.” This term is a highly offensive term today, but it was used at the time to refer to people who are of half-Aboriginal and half-European descent.
The fight for rights for Indigenous people in Australia intensified in the 1960s, the decade during which this novel is set. It was during this time that Indigenous people won the right to vote in Australia. During this decade, two other notable incidents occurred as well. The first is that some Aboriginal students engaged in the Freedom Ride. These students rode a bus through New South Wales in Australia in order to bring attention to the poor conditions faced by Aboriginal people. The second event was the beginning of the almost decade-long Wave Hill Walk Off, in which hundreds of Aboriginal workers went on strike in order to protest the poor conditions.
Genre Context: Bildungsroman
Jasper Jones is considered a bildungsroman tale. This is a specific type of coming-of-age novel in which a character encounters difficulties that allow them to grow and mature significantly by the story’s conclusion. The protagonist of Jasper Jones reads and makes reference to numerous other well-known bildungsroman stories throughout the book, including The Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird. While many bildungsroman novels are named after the protagonist, Jasper Jones is not. Still, it is told from the first-person perspective, which is a common attribute of the genre. The four key parts to a bildungsroman (loss, journey, growth, and maturity) are fully explored in Jasper Jones. For example, Charlie experiences a loss of innocence at the beginning of the novel as well as a loss of moral clarity. When he encounters evidence of Laura’s death, he sees the result of evil for the first time in his life. At this point in the story, he does not yet know how Laura died, but he is aware that she has been beaten, and this realization robs him of some of his innocence. Confronted with the evidence of senseless violence and its consequences, he loses his belief in a moral binary as well when he understands that hiding Laura’s body does harm to her family but exposing her body would do harm to Jasper. Either choice he makes will have negative consequences, and as such, it is hard for him to determine which action is the correct one.
He therefore goes on a journey of discovery to try to understand the nature of evil. At first, he does this abstractly by using books to research murderers and to try to understand why they killed people. He is less concerned with how they killed people because his desire is to understand their underlying motives. As the story progresses, his journey brings him new growth when he goes with Eliza to the clearing and learns what evil really befell Laura. It is here that he finally comprehends the devastating confluence of events that prompted Laura to take her own life. By this point, he no longer feels loyalty to his mother because of her infidelity, and he begins to associate primarily with Eliza. This shift in dynamics culminates in his ability to engage in a more mature relationship with Eliza and with his father. His bitterness toward his father vanishes as the two come to see each other as equals. By the end of the story, he comes to terms with the fact that some pain cannot be fully understood and that it can lead to drastic consequences like murder and suicide. Through his psychological journey, the main character grows and matures, and thus Jasper Jones adds a twist to the more common journey-based bildungsroman, for the majority of the protagonist’s “journey” is an internal one, contrasting with the genre’s usual focus upon the concept of travel or change of setting as an impetus for growth.
