A Beautiful Mind: A Biography of John Forbes Nash, Jr Literary Elements

Biography

American during the height of McCarthyism/Cold War 1950’s through the 1980’s, primarily Princeton/Santa Monica/Cambridge, MA.

Narrated by external third-person point-of-view from a historical perspective who nevertheless occasionally makes subjective commentary on the narrative.

The tone is one of admiration for Nash’s scientific brilliance mixed with shifting moods exhibiting an overall empathy toward the subject occasionally punctuated by moral judgments mixed with gossipy interest in salacious personal details.

Protagonist: John Nash. Antagonist: schizophrenia.

The conflict which drives the narrative is the inexplicable tension between a mind capable of producing both genius and madness at equal levels within a single human being.

John Nash accepting the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for his contribution to the game theory resulting from the development of his groundbreaking and revolutionary theorem known as the Nash equilibrium.

The description of Nash’s grandfather, Alexander, foreshadows not just the problems ahead for the grandson, but also the eventual revelation that Nash’s son developed schizophrenia by alluding to the possibility that Alexander suffered from at least some minor form of the disorder if not a full-blown onset: “Alexander, a strange and unstable individual, a ne’er-do-well, a drinker and a philanderer who either abandoned his wife and three children soon after the college’s demise or, more likely, was thrown out. When precisely Alexander left the family for good or what happened to him after he departed is unclear”

“Nash became aware of a new branch of mathematics that was in the air of Fine Hall” increases the dramatic consequences of this awareness by understating what the significance of Nash’s introduction to game theory as well as downplaying the revolutionary impact that this “something in the air’ would have around the world.

The most controversial element of this biography which did not include any collaboration from Nash or Alicia are prevalence of allusions to multiple homosexual liaisons by Nash. Most of these are no substantiated and some were openly denied in the wake of the book’s publication.

Nash unexpectedly references the Beatles as imagery to describe in a latter to his sister the “special friendships” which serve as the launching point for those allusions to Nash’s homosexual affairs: “[In the film A Hard Day’s Night the Beatles] seem very colorful and amusing. Of course they are much younger like the sort of person I’ve mentioned…I feel often as if 1 were similar to the girls that love the Beatles so wildly since they seem so attractive and amusing to me.”

Paradox is, of course, at the very center of this story: how can a mind capable of feats of genius also be a mind incapable of caring for itself?

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The title “A Beautiful Mind” is an example in which “mind” is metonym for human being.

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