Joy

Character Analysis

One Card Short of a Full Deck

From the moment we meet Joy, we know that something serious has happened to him. Mac explains to Jim that old Joy can't shake hands with him, but not to take offense. Joy seconds him:

"Why is it?" he cried shrilly. "'Cause I've been beat, that's why! I been handcuffed to a bar and beat over the head. I been stepped on by horses." He shouted, "I been beat to hell, ain't I, Mac?" (15)

Joy's general enthusiasm for the cause and outright glee over his many injuries tells us something about his place in the Party: he's not a fancy-pants intellectual at all. Joy is helping to advance the rights of the worker with his breaks and bruises.

That seems like a harsh position for any activist to be in, but Joy embraces the violence as his only outlet for protest. It turns out that talking—as Mac and Jim do—isn't Joy's strong suit. Dick explains to Jim that Joy's current dilapidated mental and physical state is due, in part, to the last time he tried to rally people with his words:

"Joy was speaking at a barber shop. The barber put in a call and the cops raided the meeting. Well, Joy's a pretty tough fighter. They had to break his jaw with a nightstick to stop him; then they threw him in the can. [...] He's been screwy ever since. I expect he'll be put away pretty soon." (18)

While Joy sounds a lot like your average crazy great-uncle who talks about his war experiences over Thanksgiving dinner, he's not meant to be comic relief. Joy's experience of institutionalized violence paints a bleak picture of what nonconformity means for the individual. For Joy, constant encounters with brutality and cruelty slowly rob him of ability and dignity. That's straight-up tragedy.

Sacrificial Lamb

It seems that Joy's oldest friends are always half joking about his probable fate: he'll wind up in an institution, or he'll be clubbed to death for fighting with a police officer. But not one of them could have predicted that this ridiculous, belligerent figure could do something really big for the cause.

Mac's totally surprised when Joy has the decency to get himself shot in a very public and useful way. While Mac does grieve for his friend, he also senses that this is Joy's last chance to actually do something for the Party (other than get arrested). But to those around him, Mac's desire to use Joy's corpse to rile the workers to action is nothing short of inhuman. So Mac has to set them straight:

"What do you know about it? Joy didn't want no rest. Joy wanted to work, and he didn't know how." His voice rose hysterically, "and now he's got a chance to work, and you don't want to let 'im." (129)

If Joy has to make the ultimate sacrifice, Mac wants to make sure the Party gets some mileage out of it—for old Joy's sake. We're not sure if this makes Mac a sociopath or the best friend a militant communist could ever have.

Joy's death does make an impact on the strike, even though it isn't the thing that sends it over the edge. What it definitely does do is confirm for Jim something that he's been feeling for a long time: that individual sacrifice is nothing compared to the greater good.

Nothing Diminutive About the Dude

Although Joy does cut a ridiculous figure, at least on the surface, we can see that his entire heart and soul belong to something bigger than himself. Mac recognizes and honors this in his impromptu eulogy delivered over the pine coffin in London's tent:

"I don't know why we say 'poor little guy'. He wasn't poor. He was greater than himself. He didn't know it—didn't care. But there was a kind of ecstasy in him all the time, even when they beat him." (161)

As Doc Burton says to Jim, there's a kind of religiosity in the language that the most zealous supporters of the cause use to speak of their experiences. We can see that very clearly in Mac's description of Joy's life. Joy trades the human desire for comfort, peace, and admiration for something more enduring: a life of purpose, dedicated to an ideal that would never benefit him in his lifetime.