39 pages • 1 hour read
Robert LawsonBen and Me: An Astonishing Life of Benjamin Franklin by His Good Mouse Amos
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1992A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Humanity of Heroes
Amos’s insistence on telling the unvarnished truth reveals many of Ben’s flaws, highlighting the humanity of “Dr. Franklin,” one of the esteemed founding fathers, who is best remembered for his wisdom, patriotism, and diplomacy. Instead of foregrounding Franklin’s admirable qualities, Amos’s narrative demonstrates Ben’s pride, self-interest, and extreme vanity, drawing attention to the fact that Franklin was a real, flawed human being rather than a superhuman ideal. People often regard their cultural and national heroes as exemplars rather than as complex, often contradictory, individuals who possess many of the same faults as any other person. Amos’s portrayal of Ben highlights The Humanity of Heroes, focusing a great deal more on his realistic humanness rather than Franklin’s idealized heroism.
To be sure, Franklin lived during an extraordinary time in American history, but Amos’s portrayal of Ben paints the man as rather, well, ordinary. Amos is the innovative conceptualist who has the idea for the efficient, freestanding Franklin Stove. Amos is the keen observer who realizes that lightning is, indeed, electrical before Ben does. According to the terms of their contractual agreement, Ben will simply ensure the delivery of food to Amos’s family, while Amos must provide “advice, aid, assistance, and succor, at all times and under all conditions, and with [Ben] constantly to abide” (17). In short, Ben appears to need a lot more help from Amos than Amos needs from him. The fact that Amos usually travels inside Ben’s fur cap, so close to Ben’s brain, even symbolizes the significant influence Amos has over Ben and how much Ben relies on Amos for his higher-order thinking.
Amos’s narrative repeatedly demonstrates Ben’s vanity, pride, and lack of self-awareness. For example, rather than ensure the accuracy of his machine’s setup, Ben cares more about having his hair curled before his exhibition. Prior to the Versailles ball, he is so obsessed with his appearance that he fails to notice when Amos hides dozens of mice in his clothing. Ben is unwilling to acknowledge the danger in which he places Amos when he goes swimming until the unthinkable nearly happens, demonstrating his pride and lack of forethought. He boasts “of the lives that have been molded by [the] wisdom” (31) of his maxims, though Amos routinely points out the flaws in their logic and the impracticability of their use. Although Ben loves to “putter around among the presses” at his print shop, Amos reports that he is generally “in the way” (32). Ben arrogantly pledges to “harness [lightning] to do the bidding of man” (40) before really understanding its nature or power. Again and again, Amos demonstrates Ben’s egotism and clownishness, qualities at odds with his public persona. In doing so, Amos highlights the fundamental and flawed humanity of the man as opposed to merely his adherence to noble principles.
The Importance of Innovation
While Ben and Me is a humorous piece of fiction, it does present some truths about one of America’s founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin, especially with regard to his curiosity, ingenuity, and desire for innovation. Franklin, the historical figure, is credited with inventing bifocals, lightning rods, the Franklin stove, swim fins, urinary catheters, and more, and Ben’s character also highly values innovation and creativity. His experiments, especially those using electricity, might frustrate and frighten Amos, but they are also key to advancing humanity’s understanding of our environment, the scientific method, and creating a safer world.
Innovations make the world a little easier to navigate and often lessen our discomfort. Ben’s creation of the Franklin stove has several key benefits. It will allow colonists to warm their rooms more effectively while using less fuel than with more traditional, less effective fireplaces set into walls. The stove is not only cost-effective but also environmentally friendly because fewer trees will need to be felled to provide wood to heat homes and businesses. After the stove’s completion, Ben makes lunch, and Amos says that “before [they’d] finished even one sandwich, the room had warmed up like a summer afternoon” (14). Certainly, the colonists living through the harsh winters in the Northeast would appreciate the new stove’s efficiency.
Likewise, Ben’s invention of the lightning rod emphasizes the significance of such innovations. Although neither the ship-rats nor Amos believes him, Ben hypothesizes that installing the rods on ships will protect them from lightning, and he convinces the captain of the ship bound for England to let him. Although the rats “don’t hold with no such new-fangled notions” (63), Ben’s invention will go on to protect ships, skyscrapers, and homes in the future by safely channeling its electricity into the ground or water below.
Ben frequently accuses Amos and others who resist his new ideas of having “no vision,” and he continues to refine current technologies and invent new ones with great enthusiasm. For example, on the ship to France, “he had a new theory for setting the sails which he told the Captain would greatly increase our speed” (73). He may, at times, lack forethought or pursue some innovation with self-interest, but his inventions and new ideas certainly do impact lives for the better and will continue to do so in the future (though he and Amos don’t know this, creating some dramatic irony that makes Ben’s hapless gusto more endearing to readers than to Amos).
The Benefits of Collaboration
The benefits of collaboration are demonstrated in the text many times over. Although, at times, characters become unwitting participants in others’ plans, true collaboration leads to innovation and offers greater opportunity for creativity and even political success.
The Franklin stove is a perfect example of how Ben and Amos lend their individual strengths to achieve something neither could alone. Although the idea is based on Amos’s memory of his family gathered around a roasted chestnut, it is Ben who procures the “scraps of iron, tin and wire” (10), as well as the necessary tools, to build an actual prototype. It is Ben who “drew out a sort of plan and went to work” (11) after Amos shares his experience. Upon its completion, Ben gleefully announces, “We’ve done it!” (14), suggesting that such an innovation would not have been possible without contributions from both him and Amos. Their collaboration results in an invention that will help countless colonial families and business owners to heat their spaces more efficiently and inexpensively for years to come.
Despite Amos’s unwillingness to assist Ben in his electrical experiments, Ben is aware of the benefits of the combined power of their minds. In regard to these experiments specifically, Amos tells Ben, “You might as well leave out that ‘we.’ I resigned from these experiments a long time ago” (50). Despite this unwillingness, however, Amos is often compelled to participate by circumstance or Ben himself. When lightning strikes the rods Ben affixed to his home’s roof, Amos’s observations convince him that “lightning was electricity—in its most horrid and dangerous form” (51). However, rather than share this information with Ben, Amos chooses to make fun of him for hiding from the lightning’s power. If Amos chose to share with Ben what he learned from observing the lightning (while Ben’s head was under a blanket), then Ben would not need to continue his experiments. Later, when Ben forces Amos to stay aloft on a kite during a storm, Amos reconfirms his earlier observations but, again, chooses not to share them. Ben is so certain that their collaborative abilities are more significant than their individual ones that he actually forces Amos to participate in an experiment against his will.
When Amos and Red collaborate, joining minds and forces to free Sophia’s children, they are successful. Had Amos relied only on the Russians and Swedes, their numbers would have been too small. Had he relied only on the mice and rats Red recruits from Paris, all would’ve been lost when they abandoned the cause to fill their empty bellies. It is Red’s wish for more Yankee fighters that inspires Amos to reach out to John Paul Jones and his ship-rats for aid, and this is the stroke of genius that clinches their victory.
In the end, the characters’ exploits demonstrate that there are a great many benefits to innovation and creative thinking, and both are easier to achieve when one collaborates with others.
