“Whacked-Out Partners”: The Inversion of Empathy in the Joey Pigza Trilogy

This essay traces how Jack Gantosʹ Joey Pigza trilogy undermines many common stereotypes about the disabled, focusing in particular on its rejection of the literary tradition that sets the impaired child up as a passive object of empathy. Inverting this paradigm, Gantos instead characterizes his protagonist as an empathetic agent in his own right. Joey, who has attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, even manages to sympathize with the unsympathetic adults around him, whose insensitive treatment of him complicates his life. Readers of the series are thus invited not just to empathize with Joey, but to emulate him, by extending their compassion to the imperfect adults as well as the impaired child.