Personality
Arnold is depicted as an average nine-year-old boy, his personality enriched with righteous, reliable morals and honesty. His parents were explorers who mysteriously vanished on an expedition during Arnold's infancy, leaving their son presumably orphaned and living in an apartment building with his grandparents and pet pig Abner. Albeit Arnold's admirable kindness normally remains untouched, his less considerate moments include revealing the mortifying secret of a friend and partaking in the savage rebellion being pulled by the fourth-graders against their new, mild-mannered teacher, Mr. Simmons. However, aside from that Arnold is usually intelligent and righteous; he once snuck out with his grandmother late at night to emancipate a sea turtle from an exhibit in a local aquarium and can be relied upon to provide his friends with good advice. Other examples of his generosity include showing kindness to his lonesome, neglected classmate Helga Pataki during their first day of nursery school, resulting in her development of an obsessive an unrequited infatuation with him that is commonly referenced throughout the series, albeit she masks it with surly behavior. Arnold's best friend is Gerald, characterized by his towering black hairstyle, who appears alongside him in virtually every episode and who frequently hangs around with him.
Read more about this topic: Arnold (Hey Arnold!)
Famous quotes containing the word personality:
“Ethics and religion differ herein; that the one is the system of human duties commencing from man; the other, from God. Religion includes the personality of God; Ethics does not.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“What we ought to see in the agonies of puberty is the result of the conditioning that maims the female personality in creating the feminine.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)
“The child begins life as a pleasure-seeking animal; his infantile personality is organized around his own appetites and his own body. In the course of his rearing the goal of exclusive pleasure seeking must be modified drastically, the fundamental urges must be subject to the dictates of conscience and society, urges must be capable of postponement and in some instances of renunciation completely.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)