Character 11

Character 11

ity, engages our emotions, and keeps us in suspense. As the contemporary American writer Eudora Welty understood, “A narrative line is in its deeper sense, of course, the tracing out of a meaning, and the real continuity of a story lies in this probing forward.” A storyteller must sustain the illusion of reality until the end of the story, unfolding events with the continuing revelation of an apparently endless silk handkerchief drawn from a skillful magician’s coat sleeve.

CHARACTER

If you are like most people, plot is what keeps you going when you first read a story, and character is what stays with you after you have finished read­ ing it. The title of Paley’s short narrative is “Samuel,” the name of its pro­ tagonist or central character, the unlucky and foolish young boy (he lacked prudence) whose actions may have prompted her to write the story.

Characters are usually the people who are involved in what happens in a story. Writers can use animals as characters, or giant insects such as Gregor Samsa, the protagonist of Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” (p. 241), or even such inanimate objects as trees, chairs, and shoes. But by the term charac­ ter we usually mean a human being with emotions whose mind works some­ thing like our own.

When we ask why did it happen? about the plot of a story, we usually find the answer in the characters, who are convincing if we can understand their actions. Paley chooses to keep her story so short that she doesn’t give her char­ acters any time to develop. They are static, not dynamic. We are told their names, but we don’t see them change during the narrative or after Samuel’s death. They are flat, not round characters. For characters to emerge as round, the reader must feel the play and pull of their actions and responses to situa­ tions. Yet Paley’s character types are familiar to all of us. Samuel is a schoolboy clowning for his buddies, and we understand why he acts as he does. Tb.e man who pulls the emergency cord in the subway car is a little more complex. We aren’t told much about him, except that his “boyhood had been more watchful than brave.” Unlike some of the other male spectators, he has no sense of empathy with the boys who are fooling around on the moving platform.