Avi’s The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle is a thrilling book full of mutiny, sadism, and murder. The proprietor of all this is Captain Andrew Jaggery of the ship Seahawk, whom many believe is a sadistic maniac with the need for rule and discipline. However, the belief has surfaced that contrary to popular thought, Jaggery is a decent man with a mental disease that causes him to have a need for order and unnatural anger towards others for reasons only attributed to the disease. While he is not terrible or has a lack of compassion (psychotic), he is not a simply ‘stellar’ person as might be denoted. He is in fact just an adequate person to the unwritten rules of how a person acts, due to his OCD. His efficiency of travel shows he is not …show more content…
This makes him tend to have aggressive thoughts and a complete obsession with order. His symptoms match up most with obsessive compulsive disorder, or OCD. From the National Institute of Mental Health’s website: “Common symptoms include... aggressive thoughts towards others or self, and having things symmetrical or in perfect order.” Simply glancing at these it is easy to deduce that Jaggery has displayed evidence of these two symptoms, and if more it is not known. This leads most to believe that Jaggery has OCD, and that saves him from being considered a horrible person. Supporting this is evidence for his symptoms, one such being his love of order. “I have spent considerable time in setting this room to rights. Have I not done well? Order, Miss Doyle, is all… You see, it’s hard to tell the difference. Everything appears in order,” (Avi 190). That, in fact, is evidence from the pen of Avi. As the book’s author, his implications would be the most trustful, no? Following is the support for his angered thoughts. He attacks several people multiple times throughout the book, in accordance with the disease. Oddly enough a disease which one have been ridiculed for having in 1832 leads to be this character’s saving