Dime Novel Discussions and Jesse James Essay Topic

Something that I noticed while talking to everybody in the class about the stories that they read was that everybody was disappointed with the characters and the way that they were presented vs. the way that they actually were.  In Jesse James, Jesse was presented as this super-human outlaw who could do anything and never die, but in the end of the story, he was a coward and ran away from Lawson to avoid being killed. People in other groups were telling me similar stories about how the main character just suddenly got killed or how they were not what they were expecting, so I know it wasn't just in Jesse James where things like this happened. Clearly these novels were not meant to be anything more than a quick read, since any analysis shows that there are some serious flaws.

If I were to write an essay on Jesse James, The Outlaw, I would have to write about how the Good VS. Evil struggle between Jesse and Bill Lawson made both of them seem almost super human. The scene on the train where Jesse James darted between dozens of bullets at once is not something an ordinary man could do. Lawson was the good guy of the story, and the only way to keep the story going was to let Bill escape all of the death and destruction that would have befell him if he weren't having a story written about him. His luck was almost inhuman. No man would have survived the things that these two characters have, especially considering the time frame in which this was written.