The Gun Symbol Analysis

The gun’s symbolism in “The Man Who Was Almost a Man” operates on two levels. The first level is what the gun symbolizes to Dave. For Dave, who has grown up to equate the respect that a man gets with the physical violence that the man is capable of, the gun represents manhood. Having a gun, Dave believes, will give him a level of power and control that he doesn’t often get to experience among his older co-workers and domineering, and sometimes physically abusive, father.

Yet at the level of the story, the gun has a more complicated symbolic meaning. Over the course of the story, the gun comes to symbolize the danger and self-destructiveness of so simplistically equating manhood with a capacity for violence. From the moment Dave gets the gun, it seems as if things are about to go disastrously, and then they do go disastrously. First, after getting the gun, he is careless in how he handles it—sleeping with the loaded weapon under his pillow, and then strapping the weapon to his thigh. The story in these moments gives off a sense of foreboding, making clear that the excitement that Dave feels for his capacity to cause violence has made him reckless and unheeding of the responsibility that comes with such power. Then, when he actually fires the gun for the first time, he is so nervous and inexperienced that he closes his eyes and accidentally shoots and kills Jenny the mule. Dave had thought owning a gun would immediately make him a man. That he couldn’t even fire the gun correctly gives the lie to that idea. Jenny’s death then ends up with Dave even more oppressed, and more of a laughingstock then he was before: he’s forced into debt to Mr. Hawkins, the owner of the mule, mocked by everyone who hears the story, and likely to get beaten by his father. The way that Dave’s purchase of the gun so profoundly backfires makes it clear that Dave’s idea that a capacity for violence is the core of becoming a man is not just false, but leads to terrible consequences. That Dave ends the story by running away with the gun—but a gun that now lacks any bullets—makes clear that he ends the story still in the sway of his destructive and simplistic conception of what makes a man, but also that he still has the chance for those ideas to change and mature.