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Who is the "jaywalker" in the Big Book, and what is the story for?

In short:

  • He isn't a real person. He is a made-up illustration in Chapter 3, "More About Alcoholism": "an individual with a passion, say, for jay-walking" (p. 37). The book never calls him "the jaywalker"; that's the name people gave the passage.
  • The story is there to show one thing: "Our behavior is as absurd and incomprehensible with respect to the first drink" as his is with traffic (p. 37). Injury after injury, promise after promise, he keeps running into the street, and the book asks: "Such a man would be crazy, wouldn't he?" (p. 38).
  • Then it turns the story on the reader: "if we substituted alcoholism for jay-walking, the illustration would fit us exactly" (p. 38), and "where alcohol has been involved, we have been strangely insane" (p. 38).
  • It sits between two cases the book presents as men it knew, Jim (pp. 35–37) and Fred (pp. 39–43), in one argument that ends: "His defense must come from a Higher Power" (p. 43).

Where it is, and what the book calls him

The passage runs from the bottom of p. 37 to the middle of p. 38. The book spells it "jay-walking" (pp. 37, 38). The words jaywalker and jay-walker are not anywhere in our sources (Big Book, pamphlets, history books, stories, service manual). Searched: jaywalker, jay-walker, jay walk, jaywalk, jay-walk and jay. Every hit is in these two pages of Chapter 3.

He has no name and no history. The book introduces him with "say" (p. 37): he is a supposed case, built to make a point, unlike Jim and Fred, whom the book presents as men it knew (pp. 35, 39).

The story, in order

  • He gets a thrill out of skipping in front of fast-moving vehicles and enjoys it for a few years "in spite of friendly warnings" (p. 37). At this stage you would call him "a foolish chap having queer ideas of fun" (pp. 37–38).
  • Then luck deserts him. He is slightly hurt several times; a normal man would quit. He is hit again and fractures his skull; within a week of leaving hospital a trolley car breaks his arm (p. 38).
  • He says he has stopped "for good," and "in a few weeks he breaks both legs" (p. 38).
  • Years of it follow, with "his continual promises to be careful or to keep off the streets altogether" (p. 38). He can no longer work, his wife divorces him, he is ridiculed (p. 38).
  • He tries every known means to get the idea out of his head and shuts himself up in an asylum, "But the day he comes out he races in front of a fire engine, which breaks his back" (p. 38).

The book then asks whether such a man would be crazy (p. 38), and answers for its own members: "We, who have been through the wringer, have to admit if we substituted alcoholism for jay-walking, the illustration would fit us exactly" (p. 38). "However intelligent we may have been in other respects" (p. 38), where alcohol was involved they were "strangely insane" (p. 38). "It's strong language—but isn't it true?" (p. 38).

What the story is for

Read alone, the story can sound like a lesson in consequences: keep getting hurt and eventually you'll learn. The chapter says the opposite. The jay-walker knows the consequences, has been hurt, has promised, has tried everything, and still runs into the street. The point is that knowing better doesn't stop him.

That is the chapter's argument from the first page:

  • Chapter 3 sets out to "describe some of the mental states that precede a relapse into drinking, for obviously this is the crux of the problem" (p. 35).
  • Jim, just before, knew he faced the asylum and the loss of his family, and still decided whiskey in milk couldn't hurt him (pp. 35–37). The book's comment, right before the jay-walker: alongside sound reasoning "there inevitably ran some insanely trivial excuse for taking the first drink" (p. 37), and "Our sound reasoning failed to hold us in check" (p. 37).
  • Right after the jay-walker, the book answers the reader who thinks he now understands himself too well for this to happen (pp. 38–39): "the actual or potential alcoholic, with hardly an exception, will be absolutely unable to stop drinking on the basis of self-knowledge" (p. 39). It wants to "emphasize and re-emphasize" this (p. 39).
  • Fred is the proof. He had heard all of it, believed he'd learned enough, and on a day with no trouble at all ordered a cocktail without thinking of the consequences at all (pp. 39–41). "I saw that will power and self-knowledge would not help in those strange mental blank spots" (p. 42).
  • The chapter's conclusion: "The alcoholic at certain times has no effective mental defense against the first drink" (p. 43), and "His defense must come from a Higher Power" (p. 43).

So on the book's own terms the jay-walker isn't a warning meant to frighten the reader into stopping. He shows a man whose knowledge, injuries and promises don't stop him, which the book calls crazy and then says fits the alcoholic "exactly" (p. 38). The chapter's answer to that is not more knowledge but a spiritual one (pp. 42–43). See: Is the definition of insanity in the Big Book? and Is "it's the first drink that gets you drunk" in the Big Book?

Read it yourself

Sources

Source Pages Date
Alcoholics Anonymous, Chapter 3, "More About Alcoholism" 35–43 (the jay-walker 37–38) 1939
All our sources (searched for the word "jaywalker" and variants) — various

Big Book page numbers are from the fourth edition (2001). The Preface says the program chapters have been "left largely untouched" since 1939 (p. xi).

Recovery Starts is independent and not affiliated with Alcoholics Anonymous. Quotations are brief and cited; the Big Book is © A.A. World Services, Inc.

These pages answer questions about A.A. from A.A.'s own published literature, read in full, with every quote checked word for word against the page it cites. Recovery Starts is independent and not affiliated with Alcoholics Anonymous. What we read, and when each source was written.