Analysis Of The Outcasts Of Poker Flat

An anonymous person once stated, “Good people bring out the good in other people.” Personally, I believe that truer words could never be said. This quote applies to every single aspect of life, because there are always people around us to make it true. And those in “The Outcasts of Poker Flat”, a short narrative by Bret Harte, are no exception to this form of natural law. In fact, the main idea of this exemplum was that even people who have done bad things can still have a little bit of hidden goodness inside of them, especially when they surround themselves with other good people. This is evident in the story by the way the characters such as Mother Shipton, John Oakhurst, and the Duchess change and soften their armed exteriors as the passage …show more content…
We were already suspect to his hidden charitable nature from the very beginning, starting with his small recollection of first meeting Tom, in which he swindled every last penny from the pockets of the poor, naive boy. But instead of selfishly stashing the money away in his wallet for good, he brought Tom aside and returned the small purse to its rightful owner, saying strictly, but warmly to him, ‘“You can't gamble worth a cent. Don't try it over again.”’ In fact, throughout the whole passage, right until he took his final breaths, you could immediately tell that John Oakhurst was a good man. While his slow-moving party of exiles were trapped in the snow, he could have easily left them such as Uncle Billy had to face the worst and fend for themselves alone. But instead of doing that, he stayed behind, adopting the unofficial role of leader among his comrades, knowing it was his duty to protect them to the best of his abilities. Not something you would expect from a town reject, I assume? As a matter of fact, when it was he, presumably, who discovered his friends lying peacefully dead and undisturbed in the snow, the grief and sorrow he had felt in that moment became too much for the middle-aged gambler. And so, unable to carry on with life, because he couldn’t live without them, the man “self-inflinctingly” passed on, unable to live without the bonds that he had formed with each individual member of the deceased party. Because he saw the affection Mother Shipton revealed, it opened something up in his own heart for the reveal of his kindnesses. There was a reason the article named him the “strongest and yet the weakest” of the outcasts, because in the end, it was his own affections and empathetic traits that led to his demise. All in all, John Oakhurst was the one character we thought would remain unfazed by the Innocents. Yet, he too, fell to their charm and developed a caring