Jayber Crow

Jonah, J., Jayber Crow is the narrator and protagonist of the novel. The reader views his coming of age as he moves from an orphan to seminary student, to town barber and church steward, and finally to a “backwoods” philosopher. Through Jayber’s eyes and memory, the reader becomes intimately familiar with the small town of Port William, Kentucky, and the colorful, unique individuals who populate it. Jayber also chronicles the shift from the 19th to the 20th century as he observes and experiences major events, such as the 1918 Flu Pandemic, both world wars, the Vietnam War, and the shift to modernization. In Jayber’s lifetime, he watches the transition from communal to global life; he experiences peacetime and wartime and mourns family farms turned into monstrous agribusinesses: “I don’t remember when I did not know Port William, the town and the neighborhood. My relation to that place, my being in it and my absences from it, is the story of my life” (27). When Jayber chooses to root himself in Port William, he exists as a permanent observer, through the windows of his barbershop, and becomes a living history of the place and persons of Port William.