Arturo The Aqua Boy Analysis

“Arturo the aqua boy”, as the carny announcers might describe but to the Binewskis he is just Arty, the boy with flippers for limbs and a megalomaniac ambition. Arty the aqua boy plays a massive role in the story geek love. His significance to the story is that he must be at the center of attention at every moment. He must have some type of control in any and everything that goes on within the carnival. Arty ties to each character of the story in significantly different ways. He knows who to manipulate and how to go about doing it. Arty inscribes different values and installs a belief system. He often shows that his personal feelings are in no way, shape or form involved in the Arturism movement, aside from his greed of power and ability

Just as every other cult, Arty receives his power from the weak, simple minded outcasts of society and those that are curious of what his cult stands for. Oly says, “What Arty wanted the crowds to hear was that they were all hormone driven insects and probably deserved to be miserable but that he, the aqua boy, could really feel for them because he was in much better shape. That’s what it sounded like to me, but the customers must have been hearing something different because they gobbled it up and seemed to enjoy feeling sorry for themselves. You might figure a mood like that would be bad for the carnival business but it worked out the opposite way. The crowd streaming out from Arty’s act would plunge deeper into the midway than all the rest, as though cantankerously determined to treat themselves to the joys of junk food and simp twisters to make up for the misery that had just been revealed to them” (Dunn 115). At this moment Arty realizes his power to control more than just his own family. The roots of Arturism were exposed in that moment. His first source of power was Alma Witherspoon who had no family or friends. She had been heartbroken from a relationship that could never be. She wanted to be different like Arty. He then decided to remove her limbs one by one, until she was a stump. Arty began his most worth source of power, the Auturan