Dave Saunders's The Man Who Was Almost A Man

Dave Saunders, protagonist of the short story “The Man Who Was Almost a Man”, is my chosen character to analyze and exhibit. Dave is a young man about seventeen years old who is in the struggle to prove to all of the adults on the farm that he is a man. To prove he is a man he wants to have a gun to shoot so that he can prove that he is a man, but when he does get the gun his plan backfires and shows his immaturity instead of proving he is a man. Towards the end of the story he gets on a train to go elsewhere to prove that he is a man. I believe Dave is in the struggle of becoming a man and is also in the pursuit of trying to become an important individual instead of being a nigger as his mother called him to let him know where he stands and as white people would call him in this time. Dave is trying to be respected and to become a man but in the end he just ends up humiliating himself.

When he gets the catalog from Joe and brings it back to his mother to get her approval of the gun he acts like a child. When he asks her in the passage he voice is described as a ‘husky, faint. There is no confidence in his voice which would make him seem more mature. He is trying to become a man by buying a gun and implying that if he can shoot a gun he will be a man because the gun will give him power and authority. Towards the end of the story he says “ Lawd ef Ah had just one mo bullet Ah’d taka shot at tha house. Ah’d like to scare ol man Hawkins jusa little….Jusa enough t let im know Dave Saunders is a man.” When Jenny the mule got shot and killed by Dave on accident. Many people came around to see what happened and when they found out Dave had killed the mule on accident with a gun they all laughed at him. This bothered Dave because it proved that he was not yet respected nor a