Joseph's Relationship In The Running Man

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The Running Man, a novel by Michael Gerard Bauer, portrays the adolescent experience as a time when an adolescent opens his eyes to the bigger picture of the world. The novel achieves this through an unlikely, unusual yet firm relationship between two people, a grim discovery about a maniacal individual that haunts his community, and personal misery that needs to be dealt with. Joseph 's relationship with Tom Leyton has helped him confront his own fears, putting his relationship with his father into a broader, more thoughtful perspective. Joseph 's plight of having an "absent father" has pre-occupied him and thus he sees his father through only a hateful? light, based fully on the surface appearance of the situation. He feels his father has unfairly abandoned him. His relationship with Tom Leyton has made him think twice about judging others, and has made him understand …show more content…

Joseph discovers that the "running man" had experienced the tragedy of losing his wife and children in a house fire, helping Joseph comprehend the "running man" and others with their troubles. Joseph was haunted by the childhood memory in which the running man approaches him running, then runs past when Joseph was vulnerable. Joseph only found the running man through a presumptive, scary perspective based on appearance, similar to the view of his father. Joseph discovers the trauma that drives the running man, and this transforms the running man from a monster to a troubled human being, in Joseph 's view. Tom helps Joseph to stop demonising "the running man" and this helps him understand the traumas that others face. The "running man" symbol is a critical motif in the text and helps us to understand the journey that Joseph goes through from being self-centred in his own personal misery and to be more understanding and compassionate. Through Joseph 's newfound understanding of the running man 's, and the roots of his madness, Joseph discovers the bigger picture in terms of people, and thus

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