Johnny Bear’s Representation as a Protagonist, Criminal and Victim

Johnny Bear

“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life thinking that it is stupid.” It takes someone with a talent to completely imitate other people including their voices. In this world there is no such thing as a villain, hero or victim. When we look at Johnny Bear’s situation from different perspectives, he is a hero, villain and a victim as well.

A villain is not always a bad person because sometimes it is the villain who becomes the hero. In nature I don’t think that anybody likes to kill just for fun, but for the sake of somebody they truly love they would do anything for that person. If we take the enemies we fight against in the battlefield as example, we know that to us they are enemies and villains. If we even dare to put ourselves in the shoes of at least one of the enemies whom we fight against, some of them kissed their children ‘goodbye’ telling them that they were going to go fight for their future freedom knowing that they would never see them again and that they would have to risk their lives in the battlefield for the sake for their children. The people whom we think are villains then turn out to be the ones who fought to save the generation of their children. Amy might look at Johnny Bear as a villain because he would ruin her reputation, but I doubt that the person she had sex with thinks the same way.

For Johnny Bear imitating conversations was a way for him to make money because the people would just sit there and drink whiskey while he imitates and engage in different conversations. He was helping spread the truth, and at that time the civil rights of the Asians were not respected; rather they were treated as immigrants. I think that every person is a human being whether he or she is Mongoloid, Negroid or Caucasoid. Everybody can be a hero, but not everybody is a hero. If a person is lying on a sidewalk, everybody is walking by, but when one person steps to help others then start to help. I would say that that person is the hero.

If we looked at Johnny Bear’s situation from his perspective, he benefited from sharing people’s conversation because the more he shares things which people don’t want to hear the more he is going to get customers. If he continues doing what he does, then people would just listen to him because their reputation might be ruined by what he said. In the story we see that he would get smacked in the head to stop him from talking because he does not care about what type of situation he would be in if he copied people’s conversations.

The people who are at the top with power live a luxurious life compared to the people at the bottom. Once a person experiences such life where he or she can get anything he or she wants, then that person would then want to be at that place and would do a lot of things to stay there. Johnny Bear was an idiot because he did not think to calculate the risks of giving out information which would ruin someone’s reputation. In conclusion, Johnny bear being a villain, victim or a hero depends on the perspective of the person involved but from my point of view I think that even though he can imitate people along with their conversation and voice, I don’t think he has empathy for other people and that has him in trouble.