The Fair Gwen Character Analysis

In the story of Max’s upbringings, he got many of his physical features from his biological father. He was raised by Grim and Gram—two grandparents on his mother’s side who disliked his father. What conflicts these two statements are his behavioral features. Did Max get his personality from how his grandparents have raised him, or from the DNA that his mother/father had passed down?

When Max was younger, in daycare, he tended to “talk with his fists”, punching and kicking other children as he pleased. This was most likely a gene passed down from his father, with Kenny Kane’s violent ways. Once Grim and Gram took over parenting, it was clear that Max learned to control himself, or had become controlled by them. Either that, or his mother’s

character had been passed down to him. Today, any traces of his father in Max as a person are gone, other than appearance. This only leaves two possibilities for Max’s psychological identity: his mother’s genes, or her parents’ upbringings.
Max’s mother was not a well-known or largely-mentioned character, so there is no solid way of knowing exactly who she was. According to Grim, it’s a good thing that Max “got his mother’s heart”, implying that Mrs. Kane was a good person in terms of kindness and grace.
The quote above implies that Mrs.

Kane was not a rugged, tough, woman, and if Grim and Gram weren’t smothering her with protection, it could be assumed that she herself was delicate and thin-skinned.

In addition, in chapter 5, the spitting image, it was directly stated that Max’s mother was a good friend of Freak’s mother, and The Fair Gwen, from what was give to me, is again, a wholesome, decent person, if not a bit delicate. A good friend of The Fair Gwen would need to be gentle with her, and compassionate of her single-parent struggles. Max is just like that, demonstrating that he cares for his close friend when he follows through on all of his shenanigans without complaint, and when he takes Freak along when evading the father.

On the contrary, these good traits could have came from Max’s caretakers, Grim and Gram. These were the same people that raised his mother, and it could have been that both mother and son had such positive character traits because of their parentage. The only hole in this point is that, as described by Max, before Max ‘rescued’ Freak at the fourth of July firework show, Grim and Gram didn’t pay much attention to him, or weren’t exactly well-warmed toward him. I can assume that throughout his childhood, he didn’t interact too heavily with his grandparents, and not much nurturing had occurred. This decreases the overall impact of Grim and Gram’s parenting, and strongly suggests that the capacity to be a good person, just like his mother, must have

come from within Max’s DNA himself.