Greg Heffley is a middle school student and the protagonist of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series. Greg is the middle child in his family with one older brother and one younger brother, and much of the novel focuses on his family dynamics with his siblings and his parents. Throughout the series, Greg uses his journals to tell stories about his life, his friends, his family, and his goal to become popular at his middle school. However, Jeff Kinney depicts Greg as an insecure person who struggles with dishonestly, irresponsibility, and insecurity.

At the beginning of the novel, Kinney reiterates Greg’s track record of leaving tasks unfinished and giving up halfway through. In the opening pages of the journal, Greg admits that his father signed him up for the swim team over the summer, but Greg started to hide out in the bathroom during swim practices because, he reasons, “Halfway through the summer, [he] decided [he] was pretty much done with swim team” (8). When Greg learns that he will have a pen pal in his French class, he decides that he doesn’t want to write in French like he is supposed to. In addition, Greg brags about all of the ways he cuts corners when it comes to his schoolwork: He copies off of the smartest kids in class, never conducts any research when he has to write essays, and when it comes to book reports, Greg just writes “exactly what the teacher wants to hear” (50) to get a decent grade.