Character Analysis
What'll we do with Big Joe? Out of all the members of the gang, Big Joe Portagee is the one who just can't seem to figure out the whole friendship thing. He's the only one who steals from his pals (at least without justifying it with the twisted logic of someone like Pilon), but he gets to remain in Danny's house because he always pays for his crimes by taking a real beating.
Big Joe Portagee is a little bit of a problematic figure because he's made out to be a big, dumb oaf, which goes along with the tradition of making "Portagee jokes." Portagee jokes are jokes making fun of Portuguese immigrants, and most of them have a punch line about how dumb the Portuguese immigrants are. Big Joe is the living image of these jokes, so we're not sure if he's a character or just an offensive stereotype.
Big Joe is constantly in jail; in fact, he's more comfortable in jail than out of it. He's there so often because he can't resist anything that comes his way—including the opportunity to commit crimes.
To take just one example, there's an incident when Joe refuses to pay for liquor at a bordello and ends up breaking all the furniture and windows before finally setting the whole place on fire. When a policeman finally comes, Joe "sighed happily. He was home again" (13.11). Joe feels at home when he's in jail because he spends so much time there, and because jail keeps him out of trouble.
The narrator describes Joe like this: "It was not a safe thing to lead Joe into temptation; he had no resistance to it at all" (13.10). So Joe is very weak: he can't be trusted with anything, really. For sure, temptation gets the best of him more than once: for example, he steals Danny's blanket, which earns him some forced labor from Pilon, and he also dips into the sacred stash of the Pirate's quarters, which gets him the beating of a lifetime from the friends.
Big Joe is always sorry, though, and he takes his punishments without complaining, so that must be why the friends keep him around. He doesn't sound like such a bad guy, really, but we're still not sure how realistic he actually is.