Shades of Gray

From the beginning, the theme of The Importance of Other People’s Perspectives is established as central to the plot as Will is introduced to various opinions held by other characters. Will starts out the novel exhibiting black-and-white thinking and an inability to recognize that he is engaging in this manner of thinking. Black-and-white thinking occurs when a person fails to see any rightness in an opposing way. Such rigidity leads a person to think something is one thing or another (either/or), leaving no room to acknowledge that there is merit in both sides and that other possibilities may exist. The black-and-white thinking Will engages in at the novel’s beginning is believing his uncle must be a traitor. For him, anyone who did not fight for the Confederacy is a traitor to the South; there is no place for neutrality. What Doc Martin tries to get Will to see is that his uncle did not betray his people; he merely chose not to fight for their side. The biggest psychological hurdle that Will encounters is his need to shift his often erroneous black-and-white thinking to a more nuanced view of situations and people. By calling the novel Shades of Gray, the author signals the importance of an expansive mindset and measured critiques to her young readers.

Word choice is important to Will. The importance of words is first brought up when Will meets his cousin, Meg, and she calls the Confederate soldiers “Rebels.” Will does not believe that the Confederate soldiers are rebels because he believes their cause is a noble cause, and as he will explain later, he believes that the Confederacy is his country, not the Union. Again, his narrow views are being challenged. His cousin does not see the world exactly this way despite living in the South herself, and Will is quick to look harshly on her family because of Uncle Jed’s failure to fight. Thus, her use of the word rebel causes him dismay from the first chapter of the book, as it denies the reality of the world as he sees it.

Will is aware of all he sacrificed during the war. He lost his entire family in one way or another during the years of the Civil War. He does not believe his aunt’s family has lost as much since their twin sons are still alive and Uncle Jed never went to war. When he comes to his relatives’ home, he is confronted with numerous differences between his aunt’s family and his own and between his aunt’s town and his hometown. First, his aunt’s family is poor, and he knows he will be a burden to them. Nevertheless, they take him in without hesitation. Second, there is no school. Prior to the war, the town did have a school, but first due to a teacher’s enlistment and now because of a lack of funds, the school no longer has anyone to teach, which is shocking to Will. While he is selfishly consumed with his losses, he does not see the various losses other people experience because of the Civil War. He will later learn how not having an education has affected Meg.

Throughout the novel, Will and his cousin have different views on slavery, but at this point, Will does not take much note of how different and easier his family’s life was because of their enslaved workers. While he acknowledges that he did not have to do manual labor, he justifies his family’s ownership of enslaved people by saying that their enslaved workers loved them. He bolsters his argument by mentioning how one of the enslaved workers went with his father to fight in the war. Will sees nothing wrong with his family’s participation in the chattel slavery system because he knows other people treated their enslaved workers much more poorly than his family did. While Meg does not make a direct judgment on Will’s family for having enslaved workers, her questions reveal that she understands the difference between the life her cousin lived and her current life, and those differences are due to her cousin’s family’s ownership of enslaved people. Because Will’s family enslaved people, they did not have to struggle in the same way Meg’s family has to, but as will later be shown, they also did not experience the same dignity through work, which will be highlighted through the theme of The Value of Hard Work.

Meg and Will’s conversation explores some of the politics behind the Civil War. While the biggest issue in the war was the legality of slavery, the war was often thought of in the South as a war for states’ rights. Many Southerners, including Will’s family, did not want the national government to control the decisions of individual states, and they were willing to fight a war to gain state sovereignty over decisions such as slavery. Because of this, they seceded from the Union and formed their own country, the Confederacy. The Union, which consisted of those states that were still a part of the United States, did not want the country to break up, and so they fought to keep the nation as one. Will maintains a loyalty to the idea of states’ rights, but Meg pushes back by pointing out that the right the Confederacy most wants to uphold is the right of individuals to own other people. She also expresses her disagreement with the Confederate view when she states her belief that a person’s rights are more important than a state’s rights. Through this, the author demonstrates that while states’ rights were a central concern for the South, slavery was intricately tied to the notion of these rights.

Will is a proud boy, and he takes this pride very seriously, doing his best not to do anything to injure it, which is shown in multiple ways in Chapter 2. First, Will refuses to use the term “uncle” with Uncle Jed. He refuses because he does not want to show his uncle this respect, believing him to be a coward. While he is living with the family and using their resources, his pride refuses to allow him to call his uncle by a familial term because he believes his uncle is a source of shame. Second, Will’s pride is shown to be important to him as he attempts to show no weakness in his work on the farm and in the country. His prior experiences have not prepared him to live in the country, and he does not want anyone to see this weakness in him. To him, pride is tantamount.