Category: Character

The course of growing up is always influenced by the people around you, since the people in your environment are vital in shaping the person you will become. Harper Lee demonstrates this reality in the classic tale To Kill a Mockingbird, through the eyes of a six year-old Scout and a ten year-old Jem in…

Often, there is no greater power that influences an individual’s development than his or her surroundings. It is one’s society that establishes what is generally accepted and how one comes to act within that society. In the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, the author Harper Lee develops the idea that an individual’s perspective of their…

To Kill a Mockingbird is many things: just to name a few, it is a comment on racism, class, and the mob mentality. In this brilliant novel, there are a lot of well defined characters whose goings on in the fictional Maycomb County help to propel the story along. One of the most interesting characters,…

Feste, the fool character in Twelfth Night, in many ways represents a playwright figure, and embodies the reach and tools of the theater. He criticizes, manipulates and entertains the other characters while causing them to reflect on their life situations, which is similar to the way a playwright such as Shakespeare interacts with his audience.…

According to Friedrich Nietzsche, “‘free spirits’…do not exist, did not exist” but “could one day exist” (18). Mr. James Duffy, the protagonist of James Joyce’s “A Painful Case” in Dubliners, has characteristics similar to that of Nietzsche’s theoretical overman. Nevertheless, although Duffy appears to live like an overman, his life ironically parallels an ascetic religion…

In Twelfth Night, creates a duality between the worlds of the nobility and its associates and the said “outsiders.” There is a great element of selfishness involved in the actions of the characters deemed “in” as they peruse through the play drunk on love or alcohol and immersed in their personal agendas. Whether it is…

Often in literature a minor character that appears only briefly nevertheless has a significant effect on such aspects of a work as theme and the development of other characters. This is especially true in the case of Marmeladov, the alcoholic ex-clerk in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. A dominant theme of the novel is that of…

Initially, the salient fool in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night appears to be Feste — a licensed jester. Yet upon further examination, we see that Shakespeare merely uses Feste as a critic of the comedic disarray in Illyria, which parallels the festival Twelfth Night. The nature of the play turns both the class structure and moral values…

Many people over the past centuries have been trying to determine who the main protagonist of Paradise Lost really is. The eternal battle that exists between the forces of good and the forces of evil is a central theme throughout much of the world’s literature. Evil characters are typically identified through their associations with tragedy,…

Just one of the many short stories compiled in James Joyce’s Dubliners, “After the Race” is an effective portrayal of the shame and misfortune that result from Jimmy Doyle’s efforts to become accepted by a wealthy group of men. His constant desire to present himself as an aristocrat, one who is consistently in the company…