Character analysis of edie in how i met my husband

Discussion 2-Character Analysis And Setting

In the stories you have read in Chapters 4 through 7, you have been introduced to several kinds of characters. Select another story from your textbook that is different than the one you analyzed in the “Literary Techniques and Their Connection to Conflict in Literature” discussion and identify and consider a character you sympathize with. Reflect on why you identify with them and how that character is constructed by the author.

“Everyday Use” (Alice Walker, 1973) Guiding Questions:

1. How do we know that the protagonist is impoverished? Is she content with her class? Why or why not?

2. How do we know that she is African-American? How does her alienation due to her race also connect with her education?

3. The protagonist’s daughter, Dee, who has embraced her African roots, accuses her mother of not understanding her heritage. Why? What is the situational irony at the end of the story?

Your initial post should be at least 200 words in length. The minimum word count does not include references.

As you write your post, answer the following questions:

identify the character and the literary work he or she appears in.
Why did this character interest you? What choices does the character make, and how do the choices (or the result of the choices) contribute to the theme of the story?
What kind of conflict (internal/external) did this character encounter, and how did he or she handle it?
How does the setting contribute to the character’s development?
How does the setting contribute to the character’s experience and give the story more meaning?
Incorporate readings found in Chapters 4 through 7 to help illustrate the points you make.

The Short Story: Setting and Character

“A writer tries to create believable people in credible, moving situations in the most moving way he can.”

—William Faulkner, Nobel Prize–winning American fiction writer

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Learning Objectives

After reading this chapter, you should be able to do the following: • Define setting and analyze its use in a short story. • Compare and contrast the various types of characters that appear in short stories. • Discuss the various ways characters shape the action in a short story. • Analyze the use of setting and character in this chapter's literary selections.

Character Chapter 5

5.1 Setting Setting identifies conditions, including time and place, of the action in a story. The time may be in the past, present, or future; the location may be real or imaginary. Also, setting is an element that establishes the atmosphere in which the characters live and stimulates the reader’s imagi- nation. Sometimes, it has a cultural aspect as well, which might include local customs, dress, speech, or patterns of thought. To more fully portray people and life in a particular region, writ- ers use local color—consisting of unique images, realistic dialogue, and true-to-life descriptions. Usually, the author describes the setting as the story begins, often presenting necessary factual information succinctly. And, typically, the setting includes a key element—perhaps a time of day, a season, or a political or religious climate—around which the plot will unfold.

In “The Gift of the Magi,” discussed in Chapter 4, the basic time and place questions about the setting are immediately answered: We are told that it’s Christmas Eve and that Della is in the modest flat, with its broken mailbox and broken doorbell, that she and her husband share. She’s sobbing on a “shabby little couch,” anxious about not having enough money to buy an adequate Christmas gift for her husband—”something fine and rare and sterling.” Further, we are told that Della and Jim, though they are being financially squeezed at the moment, have genuine affection for each other, which enables them to accept their situation. Nevertheless, as Della moves to the window, she is struck by the dullness of her life, reflected by “a gray cat walking a gray fence in a gray backyard.”

In particular, these details allow the reader to connect to the physical place imaginatively. Additionally, they provide essential information about the couple’s relationship and reveal Della’s present emotional outlook. With the setting sufficiently established, action in the story begins— urgently driven by Della’s feelings and the fact that it’s Christmas Eve and time is running out for gift buying.

5.2 Character A character, of course, is a fictional person in a story. Characters carry out the action of the plot and in doing so they come alive as individuals. Through their appearance, responses, thoughts, relationships, and actions, the reader comes to understand them. Sometimes, in fact, the reader senses changes in a character’s motivations and values even before they are revealed in the story. In other words, characters give a story its life. They are representations of real people who change and develop. As such, literary characters fall into several types:

• Round characters are characters whose behavior is dynamic. They change and develop over the course of the story, revealing multiple aspects of their personalities and natures. Like real people, round characters are complex, most often exhibiting both positive and negative personality traits. They attract audience attention more than flat characters do; they change as their insights develop and deepen; their vitality connects with real life at multiple points. Thebedi in “Country Lovers,” discussed in Chapter 3, is an example of a round character: Her motives, fears, strengths, and weaknesses are all revealed, making her a dynamic and knowable character—an idealist who learns about personal and social acquiescence.

• Flat characters are static rather than dynamic; they are one dimensional and predictable in their behavior. E. M. Forster (1955) observes that flat characters in their purest form “are constructed around a single idea or quality: when there is more than one factor in them,

Character Chapter 5

we get the beginning of a curve toward the round” (135–136). Thebedi’s husband, Njabulo, is an example. He simply accepts life as it comes, marries Thebedi, quietly receives a child who is not his, and continues his routine pattern of work in bricklaying and odd jobs in construction. However, flat characters often add vitality and have a memorable role in a story. Young William Collins, the pompous, imprudent estate heir whose marriage pro- posal Elizabeth turns down in Pride and Prejudice, is such a character. He is described as “not a sensible man,” and notably at various points in the story his behavior reveals the accuracy of that singular characterization. He does not change.

• Stock characters, also referred to as stereotypical figures, are characters who traditionally appear in literature and are readily recognized for exhibiting “role behavior,” such as that of the mad scientist, the damsel in distress, the cruel stepmother, or the boy next door. They are minor characters often used to create humor or provide sharp contrast with main characters in a story.

In many stories, the conflict between the main character (the protagonist) and an opposing char- acter (the antagonist) shapes the action.

• The protagonist is the main character in a story. He or she is the most developed figure, upon whom the plot is centered and its outcome depends. Normally, the audience identifies with and applauds the protagonist’s heroic actions in defeating whomever or whatever the opposition is—or, at the very least, emerging successfully from chaotic, challenging cir- cumstances. Typically, the protagonist is likable and often admirable, but this is not always the case. A classic example is Dorian Gray in Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. He gives himself over to corrupting ideas that continuously drive him to commit acts of human cruelty. He recklessly ignores the consequences of his actions, which eventually cause several deaths. As this ignoble behavioral pattern unfolds, his portrait reflects the deteriorating state of his soul, exhibiting new shades of ugliness until the portrait becomes that of a monster.

• The antagonist is the individual or force opposing the protagonist, setting up the clas- sic struggle between a hero and a villain. An antagonist must be seen as a credible rival, capable of successfully creating difficulties for the protagonist. The “A & P” store manager, Lengel, fits this role in Updike’s story, discussed in Chapter 2. His actions are few, but they are solid and precise—and completely opposite of the actions Sammy would take. What he tells the girls in bathing suits is enough to make Sammy quit his job and walk out of the store, overcoming any hold that Lengel has on him. In this sense, Sammy wins. But underlying Sammy’s words and actions is a deeper struggle: Sammy perceives his personal worldview to be superior to Lengel’s—and totally different. Sammy sees Lengel’s whole way of life as an antagonistic presence, and he’s content to sever himself from it entirely. Protagonists commonly struggle against threatening ideas, impending chaos, or even nature itself, as the veteran fisherman, Santiago, does so nobly in Hemingway’s novel The Old Man and the Sea.

• A foil is a minor character in a story or drama whose nature and observable actions are distinctly different from those of the main character. This sharply contrasting behav- ior allows the reader to better understand the protagonist’s strengths and weaknesses. Similarly, sometimes the behavior of a foil can be a source of inspiration for the protago- nist, stimulating new motivation to change, which, of course, alters the plot or outcome of the story. We are first introduced to the role of foils in stories we hear or read as children. In the Cinderella fairy tale, for example, the stepmother is Cinderella’s antagonist; her two

An Annotated Story Illustrating Elements of Setting and Character Chapter 5

ugly stepsisters are foils, providing a striking contrast to Cinderella’s remarkable natural beauty. This contrast intensifies our identification with Cinderella.

Most often, characters, like people in everyday life, are not static: They change. That’s part of what makes reading fiction exciting and satisfying. Your impressions about particular characters at the beginning of a story and the insights you gain about them by the end of the action can be dramatically different. Huck Finn, for example, is rather indifferent to matters of right and wrong when we first meet him. He is unappreciative of his elders’ efforts to penetrate his indifference through teaching and training. But by the end of the novel, he is capable of acting with purposeful honesty and integrity as he faces the issue of slavery and his friend Jim’s freedom.

Characterization is the term for the methods writers use to reveal a character. Besides describ- ing what characters do, writers make sure the reader knows what characters look like, how they think and interact with others, and what they feel and believe. If a character changes over the course of the story, the writer must allow that change to develop naturally if it is to be credible. In her reflection “On Writing Short Stories,” Flannery O’Connor observed, “In most good stories it is the character’s personality that creates the action of the story. . . . If you start with a real per- sonality, a real character, then something is bound to happen.”

5.3 An Annotated Story Illustrating Elements of Setting and Character

In “A Worn Path,” Eudora Welty swiftly and effectively establishes the time of year (December) and the geographic location of the story (the South); she identifies the main character, an old African-American woman (Phoenix Jackson); and she describes the old woman’s appearance and thoughts as the woman begins to move along the path in the pinewoods. Through her use of evocative details, Welty creates a sense of determined struggle in Phoenix. In just a few words, the author sets the external environment and internal conditions that will contribute to the action and the outcome of the story.

Eudora Welty (1909–2001)

Eudora Welty’s parents moved from Ohio to Jackson, Mississippi, where Welty was born. After earning a bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin, Welty entered graduate studies at Columbia University in adver- tising (her father doubted she would be able to support herself as a writer). She returned to Jackson, where she spent her life writing short stories and novels. Welty enjoyed photography, lecturing, and teaching. In her fiction, she was a keen observer of Mississippi life, identifying its hardships and struggles, but also offering a vision of hope and change based on family and love relationships. She won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Optimist’s Daughter in 1973 and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980.

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An Annotated Story Illustrating Elements of Setting and Character Chapter 5

A Worn Path Eudora Welty (1941)

It was December—a bright frozen day in the early morning. Far out in the country there was an old Negro woman with her head tied in a red rag, coming along a path through the pinewoods. Her name was Phoenix Jackson. She was very old and small and she walked slowly in the dark pine shadows, moving a little from side to side in her steps, with the balanced heaviness and lightness of a pendulum in a grandfather clock. She carried a thin, small cane made from an umbrella, and with this she kept tapping the frozen earth in front of her. This made a grave and persistent noise in the still air that seemed meditative, like the chirping of a solitary little bird.

She wore a dark striped dress reaching down to her shoe tops, and an equally long apron of bleached sugar sacks, with a full pocket: all neat and tidy, but every time she took a step she might have fallen over her shoelaces, which dragged from her unlaced shoes. She looked straight ahead. Her eyes were blue with age. Her skin had a pattern all its own of numberless branching wrinkles and as though a whole little tree stood in the middle of her forehead, but a golden color ran underneath, and the two knobs of her cheeks were illumined by a yellow burning under the dark. Under the red rag her hair came down on her neck in the frailest of ringlets, still black, and with an odor like copper.

Now and then there was a quivering in the thicket. Old Phoenix said, “Out of my way, all you foxes, owls, beetles, jack rabbits, coons and wild animals! . . . Keep out from under these feet, little bob-whites . . . Keep the big wild hogs out of my path. Don’t let none of those come running my direction. I got a long way.” Under her small black-freckled hand her cane, limber as a buggy whip, would switch at the brush as if to rouse up any hiding things.

On she went. The woods were deep and still. The sun made the pine needles almost too bright to look at, up where the wind rocked. The cones dropped as light as feathers. Down in the hol- low was the mourning dove—it was not too late for him.

The path ran up a hill. “Seem like there is chains about my feet, time I get this far,” she said, in the voice of argument old people keep to use with themselves. “Something always take a hold of me on this hill—pleads I should stay.”

After she got to the top she turned and gave a full, severe look behind her where she had come. “Up through pines,” she said at length. “Now down through oaks.” Her eyes opened their widest, and she started down gently. But before she got to the bottom of the hill a bush caught her dress.

Her fingers were busy and intent, but her skirts were full and long, so that before she could pull them free in one place they were caught in another. It was not possible to allow the dress to tear. “I in the thorny bush,” she said. “Thorns, you doing your appointed work. Never want to let folks pass, no sir. Old eyes thought you

Exposition—The first five paragraphs offer factual,

descriptive information about the main character

and the setting:

• The setting is rural, a cold, early morning in

December in the South. • An “old Negro woman” is

on a solitary journey. • Notice the amount of

detail about her slow pace, her clothes, her untied

shoes, her skin, her hair. • We learn her name,

Phoenix—which is also the mythical creature that rises

from its own ashes. • The information about

how she uses her cane to scatter the small animals

from her path clarifies our picture of her and reveals her character, particularly

her determination.

Enough detail has been given about the woman

to suggest that the story will involve her struggle

against aging: a struggle within herself and with an external reality. When her

path turns uphill and she admits, “Something always

take a hold of me on this hill—pleads I should stay,”

this struggle is identified as a central part of the story.

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Will she still have strength to deal with the bushes?

An Annotated Story Illustrating Elements of Setting and Character Chapter 5

was a pretty little green bush.” Finally, trembling all over, she stood free, and after a moment dared to stoop for her cane.

“Sun so high!” she cried, leaning back and looking, while the thick tears went over her eyes. “The time getting all gone here.”

At the foot of this hill was a place where a log was laid across the creek.

“Now comes the trial,” said Phoenix.

Putting her right foot out, she mounted the log and shut her eyes. Lifting her skirt, leveling her cane fiercely before her, like a fes- tival figure in some parade, she began to march across. Then she opened her eyes and she was safe on the other side.

“I wasn’t as old as I thought,” she said.

But she sat down to rest. She spread her skirts on the bank around her and folded her hands over her knees. Up above her was a tree in a pearly cloud of mistletoe.

She did not dare to close her eyes, and when a little boy brought her a plate with a slice of marble-cake on it she spoke to him. “That would be acceptable,” she said. But when she went to take it there was just her own hand in the air.

So she left that tree, and had to go through a barbed-wire fence. There she had to creep and crawl, spreading her knees and stretch- ing her fingers like a baby trying to climb the steps. But she talked loudly to herself: she could not let her dress be torn now, so late in the day, and she could not pay for having her arm or her leg sawed off if she got caught fast where she was.

At last she was safe through the fence and risen up out in the clearing. Big dead trees, like black men with one arm, were stand- ing in the purple stalks of the withered cotton field. There sat a buzzard.

“Who you watching?”

In the furrow she made her way along.

“Glad this not the season for bulls,” she said, looking sideways, “and the good Lord made his snakes to curl up and sleep in the winter. A pleasure I don’t see no two-headed snake coming around that tree, where it come once. It took a while to get by him, back in the summer.”

She passed through the old cotton and went into a field of dead corn. It whispered and shook and was taller than her head. “Through the maze now,” she said, for there was no path.

Then there was something tall, black, and skinny there, moving before her.

At first she took it for a man. It could have been a man dancing in the field. But she stood still and listened, and it did not make a sound. It was as silent as a ghost.

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Is her self-assessment of strength realistic?

Is her thinking still clear? 15

Irony is used to show the intensity of her struggle.

Just when she gets “in the clearing” and feels “safe,”

she sees a buzzard, a reminder of death.

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An Annotated Story Illustrating Elements of Setting and Character Chapter 5

“Ghost,” she said sharply, “who be you the ghost of? For I have heard of nary death close by.”

But there was no answer—only the ragged dancing in the wind.

She shut her eyes, reached out her hand, and touched a sleeve. She found a coat and inside that an emptiness, cold as ice.

“You scarecrow,” she said. Her face lighted. “I ought to be shut up for good,” she said with laughter. “My senses is gone. I too old. I the oldest people I ever know. Dance, old scarecrow,” she said, “while I dancing with you.”

She kicked her foot over the furrow, and with mouth drawn down, shook her head once or twice in a little strutting way. Some husks blew down and whirled in streamers about her skirts.

Then she went on, parting her way from side to side with the cane, through the whispering field. At last she came to the end, to a wagon track where the silver grass blew between the red ruts. The quail were walking around like pullets, seeming all dainty and unseen.

“Walk pretty,” she said. “This the easy place. This the easy going.”

She followed the track, swaying through the quiet bare fields, through the little strings of trees silver in their dead leaves, past cabins silver from weather, with the doors and windows boarded shut, all like old women under a spell sitting there. “I walking in their sleep,” she said, nodding her head vigorously.

In a ravine she went where a spring was silently flowing through a hollow log. Old Phoenix bent and drank. “Sweet-gum makes the water sweet,” she said, and drank more. “Nobody know who made this well, for it was here when I was born.”

The track crossed a swampy part where the moss hung as white as lace from every limb. “Sleep on, alligators, and blow your bubbles.” Then the track went into the road. Deep, deep the road went down between the high green-colored banks. Overhead the live oaks met, and it was as dark as a cave.

A black dog with a lolling tongue came up out of the weeds by the ditch. She was meditating, and not ready, and when he came at her she only hit him a little with her cane. Over she went in the ditch, like a little puff of milkweed.

Down there, her senses drifted away. A dream visited her, and she reached her hand up, but nothing reached down and gave her a pull. So she lay there and presently went to talking. “Old woman,” she said to herself, “that black dog come up out of the weeds to stall you off, and now there he sitting on his fine tail, smiling at you.”

A white man finally came along and found her—a hunter, a young man, with his dog on a chain. “Well, Granny!” he laughed. “What are you doing there?”

“Lying on my back like a June-bug waiting to be turned over, mis- ter,” she said, reaching up her hand.

The field of dead corn and the ghostly atmosphere are

more images of death. 25

Dancing with the scare- crow (whose purpose, of

course, is to scare scaven- ger birds) symbolizes the woman’s intent to drive

away thoughts of death, to continue her journey with

determination.

Details of the setting— here, a description of the

wagon track—are used to tell us that the old woman

is following a familiar path: She is alert and able to

pace herself in the “easy going” part of her journey.

30

The well, which “was here when I was born,” reminds

her of her long life; the drink of water helps renew

her spirits.

35

The dog and the white hunter represent new

external conflicts that the woman must face.

An Annotated Story Illustrating Elements of Setting and Character Chapter 5

He lifted her up, gave her a swing in the air, and set her down. “Anything broken, Granny?”

“No sir, them old dead weeds is springy enough,” said Phoenix, when she had got her breath. “I thank you for your trouble.”

“Where do you live, Granny?” he asked, while the two dogs were growling at each other.

“Away back yonder, sir, behind the ridge. You can’t even see it from here.”

“On your way home?”

“No sir, I going to town.”

“Why, that’s too far! That’s as far as I walk when I come out myself, and I get something for my trouble.” He patted the stuffed bag he carried, and there hung down a little closed claw. It was one of the bobwhites, with its beak hooked bitterly to show it was dead. “Now you go on home, Granny!”

“I bound to go to town, mister,” said Phoenix. “The time come around.”

He gave another laugh, filling the whole landscape. “I know you old colored people! Wouldn’t miss going to town to see Santa Claus!”

But something held old Phoenix very still. The deep lines in her face went into a fierce and different radiation. Without warning, she had seen with her own eyes a flashing nickel fall out of the man’s pocket onto the ground.

“How old are you, Granny?” he was saying.

“There is no telling, mister,” she said, “no telling.”

Then she gave a little cry and clapped her hands and said, “Git on away from here, dog! Look! Look at that dog!” She laughed as if in admiration. “He ain’t scared of nobody. He a big black dog.” She whispered, “Sic him!”

“Watch me get rid of that cur,” said the man. “Sic him, Pete! Sic him!”

Phoenix heard the dogs fighting, and heard the man running and throwing sticks. She even heard a gunshot. But she was slowly bending forward by that time, further and further forward, the lids stretched down over her eyes, as if she were doing this in her sleep. Her chin was lowered almost to her knees. The yellow palm of her hand came out from the fold of her apron. Her fingers slid down and along the ground under the piece of money with the grace and care they would have in lifting an egg from under a set- ting hen. Then she slowly straightened up, she stood erect, and the nickel was in her apron pocket. A bird flew by. Her lips moved.