97 pages • 3 hours read
Joseph BruchacCode Talker
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2005A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Character Analysis
Ned Begay
Begay is a Navajo man who is small in stature, high-spirited, smart, and curious. He narrates the book and begins by looking back to when he was an anxious six-year-old waiting to discover whether he would be sent away from his family to boarding school. His narrative concludes in his adulthood, when he’s a World War Two veteran, a teacher of Navajo language and culture, and an active member of the Navajo community.
Ned is an obedient but inquisitive child, respectful of his elders while maintaining his curiosity and interest in the world. He excels in school and appears to adhere to the mission school’s policy against speaking Navajo, but he secretly maintains using his native language, which provides comfort in the strange place. During school, and then as a Marine in World War Two, he maintains the Navajo rituals that are so important to him.
In school and while serving in the military, Ned is compassionate not only to his fellow American troops but also to the foreign civilians and indigenous peoples he encounters in the Pacific islands. He relates the experience of Navajo oppression by white settlers to the experience of other oppressed peoples in the world, including the Japanese.
Johnny Manuelito
Johnny Manuelito is an older Navajo boy who returns to Ned’s high school after spending time in the Marines. He’s considered an excellent student and is described as having a serious, stately bearing, commanding respect from Navajo and white people alike. His peers and community members assume he will be decorated in the military. Manuelito is one of Ned’s instructors when he initially learns the code used by code talkers.
Georgia Boy
Ned befriends Georgia Boy at boot camp. George Boy is tall and white, with blonde hair and blue eyes, and a good-natured disposition. He speaks with a southern accent. He initially approaches Ned because he’s illiterate and needs help reading a letter received from home. He’s concerned that if the military finds out he can’t read, they will kick him out, so Ned agrees to teach him how. This exchange marks the beginning of their friendship. Ned and Georgia Boy find themselves together often. The two Marines become close and look out for one another; when Ned is wounded in Guam, Georgia Boy is the one to call the medic, and when Georgia Boy is wounded later on, it’s Ned who calls for help.
Smitty
Ned’s friend and fellow Marine Smitty is always close at hand mostly because, as Ned learns, he is tasked with ensuring that no US soldiers confuse Ned for an enemy combatant. Begay and Smitty wind up in many of the same places over the course of World War Two.
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