Skills
Reacher has the uncanny ability to know what time it is, at any time of the day, without referring to a clock. He often uses his internal clock as an alarm, enabling him to wake up at any time he chooses.
It is revealed throughout most of the books in the series and in particular Bad Luck and Trouble that Reacher has a fascination with mathematics.
Reacher is highly skilled at fighting, enhanced by in-depth technical and military knowledge. He has experience and skills from various martial arts, although he is not an expert in any particular style. Reacher's favorite techniques include elbow strikes, uppercuts, and headbutts. His experience, skills, knowledge and strength aid him in fighting, as he is sometimes stronger than his opponents but often matched with similar or larger enemies. As revealed in Nothing to Lose, Reacher hates confronting an opponent armed with a knife, believing that he has "no particular talent for it".
He mentally plans his fights using physics in a scientific calculating method. He knows how to break a man's neck with one hand (Bad Luck and Trouble) and kill a villain with a single punch to the head (Running Blind and 61 Hours) or chest (Worth Dying For). In a fight against a 7 foot, 400 lb steroid-using thug (Persuader), Reacher was able to lift his opponent into the air and drop him on his head.
A common element of the Reacher novels is his extensive knowledge of weaponry and calculated use of brutality when necessary. Reacher's use of violence is emotionless and matter-of-fact; his feelings towards his opponents is almost always impersonal. Two notable exceptions to this was a bartender Reacher encounters during an Army investigation in the prequel novel The Enemy (Reacher badly maims the man in a fight but later learns that he was not involved with the story's antagonists) and, in Persuader, a former intelligence officer who had sadistically killed a Sergeant First Class Kohl, D.E.(Dominique) a brilliant investigator and beautiful woman under Reacher's command seeking to arrest him for treachery (whose murder at the end of the novel at the latter's hands is described as an act of revenge).
Reacher is always aware of his surroundings; he always sits with his back to the wall, so that he can see those entering a room so he cannot be attacked from behind.
Reacher is a skilled marksman. In addition to being the only non-Marine to win the Marine Corps 1000 Yard Invitational rifle competition, he also won the US Army Pistol Championship and served as a pistol instructor. In One Shot, Reacher uses his enhanced intelligence with advanced technical and military knowledge during a long range shooting scene—slowing and counting his heartbeat while calculating wind, humidity, trajectory, speed, energy and force. Throughout the novels, Reacher has shown great skill in the use of various types of firearms.
Read more about this topic: Jack Reacher
Famous quotes containing the word skills:
“Some parents were awful back then and are awful still. The process of raising you didn’t turn them into grown-ups. Parents who were clearly imperfect can be helpful to you. As you were trying to grow up despite their fumbling efforts, you had to develop skills and tolerances other kids missed out on. Some of the strongest people I know grew up taking care of inept, invalid, or psychotic parents—but they know the parents weren’t normal, healthy, or whole.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“The naive notion that a mother naturally acquires the complex skills of childrearing simply because she has given birth now seems as absurd to me as enrolling in a nine-month class in composition and imagining that at the end of the course you are now prepared to begin writing War and Peace.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“Play for young children is not recreation activity,... It is not leisure-time activity nor escape activity.... Play is thinking time for young children. It is language time. Problem-solving time. It is memory time, planning time, investigating time. It is organization-of-ideas time, when the young child uses his mind and body and his social skills and all his powers in response to the stimuli he has met.”
—James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century)