The next character in the story is the son. The son is displayed just like any other child. A typical child that is playful, and can become in need of his father when in pain.
The villagers also play a significant part in this story as characters. The author portrays these villagers as ignorant in terms of snake venom and also in terms of the money. There villagers ignorance of money is shown in line 68, ‘Go you fool. It’s two hundred baht they are giving. You’ve never had that much in your whole life.’ In this quotation it almost seems as if the author had produced villagers of callousness. They seem to think that two hundred baht is more important then the child’s life. This is proven is the way the call him ‘fool’. They basically in effect trying to say they he is stupid to stay with his son, and instead he should go and get the money.
The last key character in this story is the Deputy District Officer. The officer is shown to be an obnoxious, arrogant and bureaucratic person. This is clearly proven in line 98 where he deliberately makes the father wait for him, even though there is no need for it. The author has made him into a person that thinks he can treat people with disrespect and keep them waiting, just because he is going to give them money. This trait of the officer is shown in line 119 ‘and now why do we have a lot of children?’ This clearly shows the disrespectfulness of the officer because is asking an offensive question.
This story gives an idea of what changing times can do a country. This is because the idea of ‘welfare state’ is a quite a recent concept in most countries in the world. The rice farmers in Thai who have suffered starvation and draught for centuries, are most likely to be new to it, and do no know how to make of it. This is probably the reason for the villagers preferring money over the life of a boy.
At the end of the story there is a tragic and painful climax. This tragic climax was the result of the callousness and heartlessness of the fellow villagers of the father. At the end they call him lucky ‘What luck! You sure have good luck Nak. One more day and you’d have been out two hundred baht’. When they call him lucky, the father (Nak) thinks that his son survived, but when they say the last sentence, it probably dashes his hopes and by doing this the author produces a painful and tragic climax.
The similarity between these stories is that, the way new and modern ideas affect people with traditional views. In the first story the new and modern ideas corrupt the sense of the headmaster and cause him not to compromise with the priest and close down the ancestral path. And in the other story the villagers are corrupted by the idea of receiving money, that they think it is more important then the dying child.
The contrasts of the two stories are that, the climax is steadily built in the first one whereas the second story the gold legged frog, the climax is sudden and unexpected. Also another contrast is that the ‘Gold Legged Frog’ is not really a conflict between new and old ways unlike the Dead Men’s Path.
Both of these stories have backward societies, the Africans have one because of their traditional ancestral beliefs, the Thai people because of their ignorance in basic health, govern law and the value of life, (but who we to judge that two hundred BAT, may give a better the family of the farmer a better chance of survival?)
