How The Character Challenges Faced In Daniel James Brown's The Boys In The Boat

In life, many people seem to have problems with trust. These problems usually stem from prior developed issues. Daniel James Brown’s book, The Boys in the Boat, tells the story of Joseph “Joe” Harry Rantz who experiences struggles of abandonment and his ability to make the University of Washington rowing crew. To combat this, George Yeoman Pocock, the crew’s shipwright and mentor, gives Joe advice in order to overcome these obstacles in his life. Throughout Joe’s journey, he comes to learn that, in order to succeed one must learn to trust and depend on others. In the beginning as Joe began his treacherous journey which eventually led to the Olympic gold, he was faced with obstacles of abandonment that expedited his problems of distrust. Joe

Joe’s trust issues continued to burden him throughout his training with the crew. When he comes into the boat house as George Pocock is building the teams the new boat, Pocock gives life changing advice, “[h]e talked about the underlying strength of the individual fibers in the wood, gave cedar the ability to bounce back and resume its shape or take on a new one”(Brown 126). Pocock sees every member on the team as “an individual fiber in the wood.” Pocock implies that Joe and the team needs to be held up by individual fibers or it would break. Also Pocock relates the cedar, or the larger wood piece, to the team as a whole. If they all play their part then the wood will be stable, and if not the wood would snap. When he says the cedar has “the ability to bounce back”, it symbolizes how with a well synchronized team, the team would be able to recover as one unit. The team had to cooperate and survive with each other in order to do this. It took the strength of every team member to work as this one unit. They had resilience to work through their differences in order to eventually be rewarded with both teamwork and the olympic