Jujitsu for Christ | Characters & Character Analysis

Jujitsu for Christ Characters

Like others of the best "Southern" novels, Jujitsu for Christ is filled with odd, interesting, idiosyncratic characters, both black and white, who strike the reader as unique individuals but who are instantly recognizable and familiar to anyone who has lived in and closely observed Southern society.

What this means is that Butler, as novelist, has performed the rare feat of creating and portraying human character in such a way that the individual and the typical are blended so perfectly that the characters seem real. It is exactly what Chaucer achieved on a larger scale with his Canterbury pilgrims, and what other authors have done in their most successful work.

Butler's characters include, in addition to Roger, Patsy, and the Gandy family, an array of the most striking minor characters to be found in contemporary fiction. One is Jimmy McMorris, a student-politician and highly visible Christian in high school. His father is pastor at First Baptist; he is himself president of the school Bible Club and a leader in the Youth for Christ organization, as well as an athlete. He is smooth and manipulative; in later life he will succeed in politics. He also, unobtrusively, winds up with Roger's girlfriend, Patsy. Other impressively drawn white characters include June McMullen, who has "come back home" after taking a degree in art at Vanderbilt and becomes Roger's next girlfriend (although she is several years older than he), and Roger Tutwiler, a young banker who befriends Roger Wing, hires him as a bank guard, eventually fires him in an ironic twist after Roger thwarts a bank robbery, and finally winds up with Roger's second girlfriend, June. The list is rounded out by William Percy Alexander Sledge, known as Little Wide Load, who is a second-string fullback for the University of Mississippi football team. In one of the novel's last scenes, Little Wide Load charges drunkenly into the midst of a Ku Klux Klan rally, wreaking havoc. Minor black characters are portrayed with equal skill. They include Mosey Froghead, proprietor of a locally famous and disreputable barbecue restaurant and beer joint; Leon Cool, a radical activist, drug dealer, and petty criminal; and the wino and murder victim Elrod.

Butler's physical descriptions of these characters and their actions are mas terly, but it is in his rendering of their individual voices — what they say and how they say it — that the author most effectively...
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