The importance of the characters in a story.

The actions from the characters in the story, tells us sometimes what the person is like. The girl from the story “Enough” by Alice McDermott, has a very particular way to eat ice cream: “She does not load the spoon up and then run the stuff in and out of her mouth, studying each time the shape her lips had made ( ‘Look how cross-eyed she gets when she’s gazing at it’)”  (145). She eats the ice cream in an addictive way. Eating ice cream like that, is not going to keep anybody slender . The woman never stopped eating ice cream in big quantities, which makes her a static character and motivated because of the pleasure that she gets from eating the ice cream. When the woman gets old and becomes widowed, her family begins to worry about her weight. “It was her weight that concerned them, said their children, conferring” (147). All those descriptions give the idea of an overweight person even though the story does not mention how much her weight is. The other characters in the novel seem to like this woman very much because she is a tender and sweet person who is never going to change.

        Authors sometimes use names to describe characters giving a foreshadow of how the character will perform in the story. Nathaniel Hawthorne symbolizes the qualities of the main character from the story “Young Goodman Brown”. Young Goodman Brown sounds more like three adjectives rather than a name. At the beginning Young Goodman Brown is a good Christian, “We have been a race of honest men and good Christians since the day of the martyrs…” (333). However, he had a dream that changed his personality dramatically making his name ironic and contrary to what it is supposed to mean. He switched his good personality to a bad one “A stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful if not a desperate man did he become from the night of that fearful dream” (340). This story in particular emphasizes on the names of the characters. Such as, Faith who is Goodman’s wife and a woman called Goody Cloyse who gave him catechism in his childhood. These two ladies affected Young Goodman Brown’s life in a positive way, but in the end, he mistrusted everyone including them.

        It is fun analyzing the characters knowing the different techniques the authors use, such as: physical features, names and actions. All these techniques help readers to relate themselves even more to the characters and perhaps learn a lesson from the characters’ lives.

Works Cited

Meyer, Michael, ed. The Bedford Introduction to Literature. 6th ed.  New York:

Bedford/St. Martin's, 2002.

McDermott, Alice. “Enough.” Meyer 144-48.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “Young Goodman Brown.” Meyer 331-40.

Updike, John. “A&P.” Meyer 606-10.