Difference in roles of female protaginists and how roles of minor charchters enhance their roles in antiggone and visit.

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 “A lock cannot be unlocked without the right key that fits into the hole.” Many books written by famous authors follow the concept of a lock-and-key. The major characters lead the story while the minor characters just add the key elements to it which highlight certain qualities and aspects in the protagonist.  The term foil is primarily used for the minor characters who play an important role to enhance the role of the protagonist. Minor characters are the intense-situation makers that help the reader interpret situations that the writer could not express through their writing or with the help of the protagonist. Claire Zachanassian and Alfred Ill in The Visit and Antigone in Antigone play the major characters in contrast to the minor characters played by the husbands, the butler, the Guelleners, Haemon, Ismene and the nurse in the respective texts. My essay will further elaborate on the point of how the roles of minor characters enhance the role of the protagonist.

A famous critic, Kurt J.Fickert, once said, “There’s wit and wisdom in Durrenmatt’s names”. The names of the characters in The Visit are very symbolic. Each of them depicts what the personality of each character is going to be like. Coming to the female protagonist of this text, Claire Zachanassian, her name sounds Greek and can be interpreted as the name of a Greek Goddess, of perhaps Death, as it tells us that she has come to Guellen to kill someone.

On further reading the text we find out that her motto of visiting her old town was to take revenge from her childhood sweetheart, Alfred Ill, and kill him. There are many characters, or foils, that bring out certain aspects of her personality. The husbands for example, many in number, shows us how money minded she was and that she never did have an emotional attachment to any of them. She used all of them only for money and fame and enjoyed the power she had over them. She was very dominating in nature and made sure that she married only the rich and famous men of the world. One of the reasons of Claire treating her husbands in such a disgraceful manner could be her past experiences with men. Her childhood lover, Alfred Ill, had abandoned her with a baby in her womb and went and got married to another woman. This deed of his left her with an un-fathered baby in her womb which was looked down upon in society and leads her to elope to another place and start a whole new life. This could be one of the reasons she till date looks down upon men and treats them lower than their status, in a degrading manner. It’s ironic how on meeting Alfred after many years she claims to be ‘very happily married’ when she is actually going to get a divorce in the next couple of days and move on to the next husband. We could say that she was a misandrist as she did have a lot of hatred towards men but it was peculiar as she treated her butlers with a lot of respect and even claimed that “butlers stay forever, husbands don’t”.

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In contrast to the way Claire treated her husbands, Antigone treated her lover in a completely opposite manner. She was said to get married to Haemon, who she looked up to and respected immensely. She knew that she was destined to die and chose to break her engagement to Haemon, to save him from the pain. Haemon brings out the sensitive and motherly side of her.

Just so that he does not get affected later on by her death, she decided to let go of her love in the very beginning. She tells him that she ‘would’ have ...

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