Pride is an emotion that has two meanings. With a negative meaning, pride is an exaggerated sense of personal status or accomplishments. With a positive meaning, pride is a pleased sense of attachment toward one's own or another's choices and actions. Johnny Tremain is known to be an extremely prideful person. Johnny has both positive and negative prideful traits that affect him throughout his life. His pride played a large role in his accident, and benefited him and other people throughout the novel as well. Johnny’s accident was the effect of his pride. Johnny was too proud. He was constantly giving orders and wouldn't take advice from others because he thought he was too good and didn't need it. Johnny accepted John Hancock’s request to have a silver sugar basin made in time for his wife’s birthday. With the deadline almost near, Dove was told to fetch a crucible for Johnny. Dove was older than Johnny, but was treated inferior by him. Dove then decided he would teach Johnny a lesson so he reached to the back of the shelf for the cracked crucible and gave it to Johnny. The crucible broke while Johnny was making the basin on the furnace causing his hand to be severely burned and crippled.
Johnny’s pride has benefited himself and others by helping him evolve into a better person. People are also not treated disrespectfully anymore due to his personality change. Johnny’s pride is recast under the guidance of Rab and the rebel leaders. His pride develops from an arrogant, defensive pride into a more effective, nobler sense of self. Johnny’s final step away from his defensive pride occurs when he allows Doctor Warren to examine his crippled hand. Interestingly, Johnny’s ultimate embrace of the haughtier side of pride is incidentally a result of another prideful soul: his father. As a French prisoner of war in Boston, Charles Tremain was too proud to reveal his own name and spent a year responding to an assumed name, Charles Latour. The