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Character Analysis Of Joe Rantz In The Boys In The Boat

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Throughout a person’s lifetime, he or she will undoubtedly encounter many challenges, and each person can choose to overcome each challenge or let it defeat him or her. For Joe Rantz, the main character in The Boys In The Boat and one of the eight boys who won the 1936 Olympics in rowing, his underlying challenge that arose was living through the Great Depression. In response to this, Joe and Washington’s crew, along with many other people throughout America, made an effort to confront these challenges. This exertion resulted in helping them to grow into stronger people, who could then set the example for the many people around them to follow suit and face their own trials. Although the challenges life presents can be difficult to overcome, …show more content…

Those who had already been working through the Great Depression, though, had arrived with some of the necessary skills already in the process of developing. During the Great Depression, it was not uncommon for people to be homeless, without food, and separate from their families. For these men on the rowing team, they had to push through these difficulties, along with passing classes grades, making enough to pay for college, and achieving physical strength to row. However, most people did not possess this hope and determination naturally. Even though there were some “violent protests and strikes… across the country”, most people claimed that “in spite of hard times, the president had given them hope,” and this hope had come through the relief from the New Deal (Grubin). The people felt like they had a strong connection or relationship with the president through the Fire Side Chats, which was Mr. President speaking to them through the radio every Sunday. They also gained this hope during President Roosevelt’s inaugural address, in which he told the country that the only thing they had to fear was fear itself (Grubin). This hope had given the Washington boys, and much of the country, hope to create a determination to push through the Great Depression’s touch challenges. By pushing through these challenges, they became stronger mentally from training their minds, socially from learning to get along with different people, emotionally from learning to control their emotions, and physically from conditioning and working hard at rowing. They had come in, originally weak but with potential, but they finished strong in many different aspects, which is also why people began to look up to them, just as most looked up to Mr.

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