Jack Reacher may seem a fairly simple character, and in many ways he is. He’s tall, he’s gifted to fight and he doesn’t like bad things to do bad things. But his genesis is slightly more complicated than you think.
Lee Child has already talked about the main inspirations behind Jack Reacher, telling the colleague author Stephen King during a discussion event that he created the character as a modern version of the mysterious foreigner archetypal that manifested itself through history, as the child explained, the “Robin Hood” stuffs “at” the ancient Scandinavian myths and the “Anglo-Saxon myths”. In the opinion of the child, the fan is a modern version of a religious figure; A savior with an almost supernatural quality that appears when you most need him and has a commitment as delighted to act in a morally honest way that he transcends the human capacity of good. Child also spoke of wanting to combine the physicity of Goliath with David’s morality, and cited his own feelings of vulnerability as a jumper for the imposing physics of reachder.
This covers the fundamental principles of the character: a great brute of a man with a heart of gold and the ability to send almost any challenger (although Paulie d’Olivier Richters, who has somehow made Alan Ritchson Petit, certainly gave him a race for his money in season 3 of “Reacher”). But there is more to Jack Reacher than these basic principles, the child saying to the New York Times that his former character of Military police also came out of a desire to repel what he considered as a tired trope. “The detective was an alcoholic,” said the author, “what was great the first time, a real problem, a real characterization. But the next guy is a divorced alcoholic. Then a divorced alcoholic which the teenager hates him. Then a divorced alcoholic whose teenage girl hates him, and he accidentally shot a child in the dark, so he must live in a cabin For the rest of his life. ” In response, Child decided to make a character who was “much more an old -fashioned guy”, with the writer adding: “I wanted to get rid of misery because, in the end, nobody likes miserable people.”
Jack Reacher is an anti-anti-hero
The anti-hero archetype to which the child refers is certainly omnipresent in the action and the genres of crime. The graying and reluctant “I no longer do this kind of” action hero which is taken from self-imposed exile has been used in everything, “rambo” films in the James Bond Run by Daniel Craig. In fact, in “Skyfall” and “No Time to Die”, 007 is exactly the kind of former Badass Lee child in Badass, Badass, before he was brought back into the fray. Even the films “extraction” of Netflix exploited this trope, with Tyler Rake of Chris Hemsworth literally withdrawing from Mercenary Work in “Extraction 2” and kidnapping in a remote cabin where he spends his days haunted by memories of his past life and watching videos of his deceased wife and his rider son on a beach.
In this sense, you cannot say that the child is wrong in his characterization of the action and crime stories. This kind of thing is everywhere. But it is interesting to see how Jack Reacher can easily fall into this same archetype of haunted hero, as evidenced by season 3 of “Reacher”, which recently broke a video visualization record. During this season, which is based on the best book by Jack Reacher, “persuade”, the hero of Alan Ritchson is tortured by his memories of an old sub-laume of the captured army and killed by a soldier thug. In history, it often faces disturbed anti-hero characterization, which shows that the creation of the child is not entirely inflexible with regard to all the anti-anti-hero. However, there is no doubt that he is also a relatively without care guy who spends his days wandering in the United States and awaiting what comes rather than wallowing in his past. Given the excessive success of books and the streaming series, this approach seems to have worked fairly well.
