The irony that Leper is the first to
enlist comes from the fact that Leper has been the odd man out and not the
first to join. Everyone at Devon looks up to and wants to be soldiers in the
Second World War. Leper, seemingly the last to join in on anything, is the first
to enlist. Earlier in the book we see how Leper shrinks away from what other
people want, “Leper looked up in anguish, shrank away from the ball and said
his first thought ‘I don’t want it’” (Knowles 39). Even Leper's name means an outcast. With Finny no longer
eligible to enlist, Brinker seemed to be the logical choice that the author
could have made. Brinker stood up as the leader of their group when Finny was
on his leave. After the snow shoveling, Brinker said that he was going to
enlist that next day, however, when Finny came back, Brinker changed his mind.
Why does the author make it sound so uncertain as to who is going to enlist
next? Does the confusion add to the irony of Leper’s enlistment?
I agree with the majority of your thesis statement, but I think that in many ways, Leper has been the first to do something. The example that is most recently given to us is his adventure of "tour skiing." Leper is in many ways ahead of his time, and like Chet Douglas, he is impulse-driven and curious, so when something interests him, he does it. "It's interesting to see the way beavers adapt to the winter. Have you ever seen it?" There is irony, however, in the fact that Leper didn't previously help the war effort by shoveling the tracks.
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