“Scout’s Honor” by Avi is a story about three friends from Brooklyn who go camping in the Palisades of New Jersey. These boys all want to earn the next level of Boy Scouts and also prove they are tough. Each of the friends has specific character traits that make him unique. The narrator of the story proves to be a problem-solver. The narrator begins solving problems as soon as the boys get to the train station on their way to New Jersey. When Horse realizes he left his mattress on the platform, he and the narrator jump off the train to get it, but Max remains stranded on the train. The narrator thinks
quickly and tells Max, “‘Wait at the next station...Don’t move!’”. Clearly, the narrator was the one to solve the problem of being separated instead of panicking. The next thing the narrator does to show he is a problem-solver is to stop an argument between his two friends, Horse and Max. In the words of the narrator, “I plopped half my sandwich into Horse’s hand.
He squashed it into his mouth and was quiet for the next fifteen minutes”. This clever action stopped the argument and demonstrated the narrator’s ability to solve a problem. Later in the story, the narrator performs a similar action to avoid conflict. It had begun to rain, and the narrator’s friends felt it was unfair for the narrator to stand in the middle of the umbrella and not get as wet as they were. In order to solve this problem, according to the narrator, “I folded the umbrella up so we all could get soaked equally”. Once again the narrator proves to be a problem-solver by making his friends feel everything is fair.
Many problems arose during the friends’ camping trip in “Scout’s Honor.” In all of these cases, it was the narrator who came up with a solution. It is clear that one of the narrator’s strongest character traits is being a problem-solver