Quentin

Quentin

This post is a character analysis of one of the main characters in Rocket boys that had a big impact on the success of the rockets, his name is Quentin. At the beginning of the book, Quentin was someone that Homer would not associate himself with to conserve his social status because Quentin was looked down upon for his "nerdiness".  As stated in the book, “Quentin was the class joke” (61). Quentin was known for being really not athletic and smart, so whenever it came time to build rockets Homer didn’t know where to start and thus Quentin became an apart of the rocket building team for his smartness. Homer’s thoughts were that “if there was anybody who might know how to build a rocket, it was Quentin”.

Throughout the story during the process of building rockets together, Quentin and Homer became really good friends by the time they graduated and all that they went through together. When it came to making the rockets one of Quentin’s main jobs was to calculate the rockets telepathy and the distance it traveled. Quentin also played a big role in translating the book that the BCMA got later in the story.

A little of his background, Quentin was always made fun of, he had no friends as far as anyone else could tell. Everyone made fun of him including Homer and all of his friends. In class, Quentin could talk about any subject in class until the teacher got tired and annoyed of him and asked him to stop. Quentin had a “narrow face, a sharp nose, crisp blue eyes, and jet black hair that looked as if it had been plastered down with a quart of Wild root Cream Oil” (62). Quentin’s father was also a coal miner from a nearby town named Bartley. A lot of the Bartley families were sliding into poverty or misery and so most of them moved away from that town. Along with Quentin’s mother, she was out of a job also. Quentin usually wore worn faded clothes which hinted that his family was not the richest of families.

After Quentin and his classmates graduated he became an engineer and went to college as he planned.