Plot
After the death of Jenny, his wife, and failure of the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company, Forrest and his son find a way to stumble through life and history.
As in the first book, Gump stumbles through historical American events through the 1980s and early 1990s.
On the first page, Forrest Gump tells readers "Don't never let nobody make a movie of your life's story," though "Whether they get it right or wrong, it don't matter."
However, the character is not an idiot savant, as in the first book, but more similar to Tom Hanks' "kind hearted imp". Frequent spelling and grammar mistakes, in the text, are used as a device to indicate the character's deficient education and cognitive difficulties.
The story suggests that the real-life events surrounding the film have affected Forrest's life. Gump runs into Tom Hanks. He even goes on The David Letterman Show and attends the Academy Awards.
He plays football for the New Orleans Saints, sells encyclopedias door-to-door, works on a pig farm, and helps develop the infamous New Coke. He accidentally crashes the Exxon Valdez, helps destroy the Berlin Wall, and fights in Operation Desert Storm with his friend, an orangutan named Sue (who survived a NASA mission and cannibals, with Gump, in the first book).
He meets many celebrities, including Colonel Oliver North, the Ayatollah Khomeini, John Hinckley, Jim Bakker, Ivan Boesky, Ronald Reagan, Saddam Hussein, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Tom Hanks (who plays Forrest in the movie).
Throughout the book, Jenny appears to Forrest as a guardian angel, and advises him to "listen to Lieutenant Dan." Lt. Dan frequently mentions a fondness for oysters, and oystering re-vitalizes the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company.
Read more about this topic: Gump And Co.
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“Ends in themselves, my letters plot no change;
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—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
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—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)