On the AMC hit television show, Mad Men, the main character Don Draper spoke very powerful words when he said, “People tell you who they are but we ignore it, because we want them to be who we want them to be.”. The main character of the novel written by Craig Silvey titled, Jasper Jones dealt with the troubles of, as Don Draper said, people ignoring who somebody is simply because we want them to be who we want. Set in 1965 in a small West Australian town called Corrigan, main character, Charlie Butkin is faced with the fear of being drafted into war with Vietnam and seeing his friends treated poorly by others because of racism. The novel kick starts, however, when Charlie is interrupted by Jason Jones tapping on his window asking Charlie for help with “finding” the Shire President's daughter, Laura Wishart.
On the night that Jasper knocked on Charlie's window he asked for help, but what Charlie did not realize was that it would change his life. Jasper took Charlie to his secret hideout and showed him his darkest secret, which was the Shire President's daughter Laura Wishart hanging from a tree. Jasper had only found the corpse and was seeking the help of Charlie in finding who was responsible for the murder. In chapter 2, we are introduced to Eliza Wishart, the sister of Laura, who is Charlie's secret crush. Another character introduced is Jeffery Lu, one of Charlie's friends who had been experiencing racism because he as Vietnamese. Eliza, along with Jeffery Lu accompany Charlie and Jasper as they find the murderer.
Throughout the novel the one suspect the boys had always had in mind was Old Man Jack Lionel, and planned to confront him about Laura's murder. The story continues to build when Jeffery makes the cricket team because another player had gone down with an illness, and leads the team to victory after he had a rough start. This has a huge importance in the novel because it comes to the point where Charlie's entire world had been flipped upside down and the person who had been judged by his race was instead cheered for and seen beyond what others wanted him to be seen as. However, even after this game Jeffery still experienced racism when his garden was destroyed by a group of men and Jeffery got ganged up on and was beaten.
The climax of the novel comes when Eliza tells Charlie that Laura had not been murdered, but she had in fact committed suicide. When Laura was alive, she would be absued and raped by her drunk father and this in addition to Laura thinking Jasper had left her pushed her over the edge. The inscription on the base of the tree that read “Sorry” was not Old Man Jack Lionel as they had thought, but instead was Laura as an apology for committing suicide. This comes as a huge surprise in the novel because Laura was not murdered as Silvey had led the readers to believe through the story. The characters also noticed in this point of the story that our world leads us to believe someone is who they are based off stereotypes and other forms of judgement.
Following the climax, Jeffery was finally given the chance to show his true skill in cricket and his popularity with the city had sky-rocketed. Instead of being seen as the Vietnamese kid, he was respected as a skilled cricket player. Charlie and Eliza had officially become a couple after all of the experiences they shared with each other. The boys also learned that the rumors of Mad Jack killing Jasper's mother were false, but he was too afraid to speak out on them so that solidified the community’s assumption that he was a killer.
To conclude, Charlie asks Eliza to marry him and she says yes and the life in the small Australian town had returned to the way it should be. The characters in the story saw exactly just how twisted and heartless people can be in this world, and that just because you are seen one way it does not mean that that way is true. The quote of Don Draper about how we see people as what we want them to be goes hand in hand with the theme of Jasper Jones,which was growing up and seeing the world how it really is, and not just how you thought it was when you were young.