Upon first glance, Stanley Kubrick's film "Full Metal Jacket" may seem as if it conforms to a classical narrative form; it touches upon some elements of the classical form, yet a large part is constructed in such a way that it fails to conform in most ways to the dominant model.
             "Full Metal Jacket" is essentially a film without a hero. Joker is the obvious choice for the protagonist of the film, but he takes a back seat to the larger protagonist who truly pushes the film forward – the group mind. Nothing Joker does throughout the film has any real impact on the world around him. He merely acts as an observer to the killing machine in front of him. Joker is a character without goals and desires; he is content with surviving the war and trying to make too many enemies in the process, for he is wise enough to know that he is not the one moving the story forward, but it is the group that is.
             Even the film's opening sequence of the film subtly shows the central driving force to the film: somber, mute faces stare into space as they get their haircut illustrates to the audience that this is not a film about individuals. It is a film about individuals being transformed to think, act and even look like one. This is why Kubrick decided to stray from the classical narrative. By centering on the group mindset as his main protagonist, Kubrick needed to show scenes in which everyone acted as one. He did this by piecing together scenes that had little to do with the next. This is especially true in the latter half of the film.
             In the first section, only three characters that are able to exhibit individual behavior are Sgt. Hartman, a heartless marine whose main goal is to instill conformity into the soldiers; a wiseass named Pvt. Joker; and Pvt. Pyle has the misfortune of being a clumsy oaf who constantly screws up, thereby making him Hartman's favorite target, and eventually the target of his fellow soldiers until he turns his gun...