Forrest Gump

Much of the discussion around Winston Groom’s highly acclaimed 1986 novel Forrest Gump concerns how different it is from the wildly popular movie it inspired. This does the novel a disservice, in that it deserves to be judged on its own merits rather than solely in comparison. That said, thematically, it is identical to the movie, and the characters are nearly all the same.

Forrest Gump is the first person narrator of the novel. He announces straightaway that he is an “idiot” with an IQ of 70. The book is written in an odd, colloquial style meant to mimic the phonetics of Forrest’s Southern accent and slow style of thinking. It is unclear exactly what his disability is, as his IQ—and his own constant insistence that he is an idiot—is the only metric by which intelligence is discussed.

Forrest’s limitations do not stop him from having a life so adventurous that is verges on cartoonishness. Once he leaves childhood behind, he is constantly finding himself in the right place at the right time. It is revealed that he is not only intelligent in some specialized ways, he is operating at the level of genius.