Creating Character Sketches: "The Rich Brother" & "Cathedral"

In today's class we briefly reviewed the plot pyramid (adding inciting incident to the model) and then focused on listing details about the characters. The purpose of this writing exercise was to show how understanding characters, their motivations, conflicts can help a reader discover the main ideas or themes in a story. Only then can the reader begin to create an effective thesis or interpretation to argue in writing.

Characteristics can be classified as concrete facts (e.g. name, gender, age, physical appearance, a character's family or lack thereof, objects that he owns or doesn't), traits (e.g. greedy, generous, selfish, selfless, careless, attentive, sexy, sexless, materialistic, spiritual, etc.).

Often a reader's understanding of some character traits may be based in the opinion of the reader, filtered by the reader's own experiences, values, and world views. This value judgment of a character is more subjective than the two previous types of characteristics. In other words two readers of the same story can reach two different value judgments about a character; he is, for example, either selfish or spiritual as in the case of Donald, the younger brother in "The Rich Brother" by Tobias' Wolff. The success of a reader's value judgment and character analysis depends upon the compelling evidence the reader finds in the story to support her interpretation.

Today's activity of creating character analysis as a class is, therefore, useful in understanding a story, examining conflict, (why conflict occurs, how it operates, and what are the results/effects), identifying significant details, and discovering questions about the story that are not easily answered based on concrete facts. From these questions an effective essay thesis can be found.

Several Possible Questions from Today's Class:

• Who is the "rich" brother?
• Who is the protagonist or antagonist, or can either be clearly classified?
• What are Wolff's ideas about religion?
• Did Peter try to kill Donald?
• What were Peter's motivations for helping his brother?
• Was Donald a "good" man? Was Pete?
• How were certain objects important in the story (e.g. the t-shirt, soda, money, farm, etc.)?
• What were the characteristics of the narrator in "Cathedral"?
• What is the significance of the shared activity at the end of the story?
• How are relationships described in Raymond Carver's story?

Be watching for the in-class essay topic to be posted by noon on Wednesday!