Bilbo’s quest to please

Bilbo is very much a people pleasing hobbit. You see this throughout the entire book. We begin in the shire where he is described as just another Hobbit with a hole in the ground. He planned the parties and knew all the social drama. He was in fact, the hobbit everyone told him to be. The other hobbits expected him to be the average hobbit and live the normal easy going life style, which he did very well and even liked to live.

                Then when Gandalf comes to Bilbo and constantly tells him the he is in fact the thief the dwarfs are looking for he begins to try and fulfill this expectation; first subconsciously and then consciously. When he hears the Thorin’s song his sense of adventure comes upon him and takes over for a minute and then he snaps back to his reality. I think that Bilbo’s argument with himself about going on the journey wasn’t that he didn’t like adventure but was breaking the expectations of the hobbits around him. He was one of the popular hobbits in the Shire and he didn’t want to ruin the reputation that he held. But, the Took side of him says “go and experience what is beyond the Shire.” And eventually, the next morning, he listens to the Took inside of him.

                This changes the expectation Bilbo has to meet. Now it’s not living as a perfect hobbit, it becoming/being the thief that Gandalf and thirteen other dwarfs believe he is. I think that the “courage” that Bilbo shows throughout the book has everything to do with his people pleasing tendencies and not so much becoming courageous. In the end of the book he has changed into a more courageous man, when adventure is within his grasp. If adventure isn’t poking him in the stomach then he doesn’t go looking for it. His Took side shuts off and his Baggins side takes over. He is once again an average hobbit with only stories to tell and no one but little hobbits to listen to him. So, he accepts that adventure happened in his life and lives once again as a perfect hobbit.