Analyzing the Characters of Waterland :: Waterland Essays

Analyzing the Characters of Waterland In Waterland Swift weaves a magical yet stalk tale of ordinary characters who live through theyre own struggles and problems manifest by the complexity of world history yet forever revolving around the isolated and mysterious Fenns. His characters ar a formidable mix of the stereotype and the unordinary as he shows us how even the just about common soulfulness can lead the strangest and roughly complex life and display a vast range of opposed emotions and thoughts. Waterland is a profound study of tender nature that not only displays the intricacies of people but to a fault analyses the workforce and woman that live among us and for which each of us can go through a name. Thus we all know an Ernest Atkinson, a bourgeois natural into wealth who finds a meaning in life in the texts of Marx which driving force him to oppose the life that has been imposed on him consequently angering his town and family. Ernest is the most interesting character in that he shows how geniuses and men with unorthodox ideas are often called rebels and segregated from the rest of society in their uniqueness and intensity. bloody shame in Waterland leads a disturbingly bizarre life that ends with her kidnapping a baby the transformation of her personality following the abortion and her increasing kind instability shows the fragility of the human mind. Her character as that of Ernest is astoundingly realistic and hence one of the most effective characters in the novel. One of the most obligate characteristics of Swifts writing is his mysterious characters, he only describes people at the most important and relevant part of their lives and the rest is left to the readers imagination. He also surprises the reader by withholding vital information about a character for a couple chapters than suddenly revealing it thus changing the readers perspective completely. This permits him to build up formidably complex minds in really short per iods of time as he only describes what is striking and forever and a day brings spick-and-span dimensions to old characters thus he shows what Mary was like when she was a little Madonna and abruptly changes our whole perspective of her when we learn of her adventures thus shedding the first layer of mystery and giving the reader something new to reflect on. Swift also for some of the characters gives us information at the very the beginning of Waterland and it takes the whole novel for us to learn how that person died (in the case of Dick) or became insane (in the case of Mary).