Addiction
The overarching theme of the narrative is the impact of addiction on a life. Benjie starts early and goes straight for the stuff: heroin. The portrait of desperation can be easily applied to the addiction of your choice, however, whether it be alcohol or spending or sex. Everything else in one’s life is subjugated to the necessities required to get that next hit and so Benjie treks along the inevitable cyclical spiraling path from becoming a good kid to lying and stealing and thence to rehab, recovering and falling right back into the abyss all over again.
The Black Experience
It is not simply enough to suggest that this book offers a portrait of the conditions of living in poverty as it is a very unique kind of poverty that is not easily translatable across racial borders, despite what some might have you believe. Appalachian whites may be every bit as impoverished as those living in black ghetto atmosphere like Benjie, but there is a world of difference between the two circumstances. It is not simply a lack of money that is at work making Benjie cynical about the great future for African Americans he keeps hearing about; it is also a long, uninterrupted history of prejudicial thinking at every level Benjie’s world is one which he views as denying not just opportunities in the past to be more than a janitor, but denying opportunities for the future for a black man to be anything more than a janitor thrown the bone of being called a maintenance. Words change in Benjie’s world but the facts remain the same.
A Hero Ain’t Just a Sandwich
The title of the book is applicable to the thematic issue of the relation of words to meaning. Benjie has given up on the idea of heroism existing in his world because what the rest of world has constituted as a hero cannot be reconciled with his own world. What is taught in school impacts students in ways that administrators and curriculum advisors often do not understand. To see a portrait of George Washington hanging in a classroom automatically brings to mind words like “Father of his Country” to many if not most, but it can also automatically bring to mind words like “slaveowner” to a different set of students. The characters of Nigeria Greene and Bernard Cohen are at the center of the exploration of the theme of what makes a hero by virtue of their debate academic debate with the point being that proposing a certain limited standard for what defines a hero in the minds of children sets a standard that is untenable in the real world of them all, not just in the world of Benjie.
