Tobias Wolff (b. 1945)
Known as much for his memoirs (This Boy’s Life in 1989 and In Pharaoh’s Army in 1994) as his award-winning fiction, Tobias Wolff writes prose that is clean and honest. He deals with the gritty realities of experience, sometimes relying on his own years as a soldier and sometimes on his upbringing, including the often strained relationships among family members, as in the following story, “Powder,” about a boy and his father navigating a hazardous winter road.
Powder 1996
Just before Christmas my father took me skiing at Mount Baker. He’d had to fight for the privilege of my company, because my mother was still angry with him for sneaking me into a nightclub during his last visit, to see Thelonious Monk.
He wouldn’t give up. He promised, hand on heart, to take good care of me and have me home for dinner on Christmas Eve, and she relented. But as we were checking out of the lodge that morning it began to snow, and in this snow he observed some rare quality that made it necessary for us to get in one last run. We got in several last runs. He was indifferent to my fretting. Snow whirled around us in bitter, blinding squalls, hissing like sand, and still we skied. As the lift bore us to the peak yet again, my father looked at his watch and said, “Criminy. This’ll have to be a fast one.”
By now I couldn’t see the trail. There was no point in trying. I stuck to him like white on rice and did what he did and somehow made it to the bottom without sailing off a cliff. We returned our skis and my father put chains on the Austin-Healey while I swayed from foot to foot, clapping my mittens and wishing I was home. I could see everything. The green tablecloth, the plates with the holly pattern, the red candles waiting to be lit.
We passed a diner on our way out. “You want some soup?” my father asked. I shook my head. “Buck up,” he said. “I’ll get you there. Right, doctor?”
I was supposed to say, “Right, doctor,” but I didn’t say anything.
A state trooper waved us down outside the resort. A pair of sawhorses were blocking the road. The trooper came up to our car and bent down to my father’s window. His face was bleached by the cold. Snowflakes clung to his eyebrows and to the fur trim of his jacket and cap.
“Don’t tell me,” my father said.
The trooper told him. The road was closed. It might get cleared, it might not. Storm took everyone by surprise. So much, so fast. Hard to get people moving. Christmas Eve. What can you do.
My father said, “Look. We’re talking about five, six inches. I’ve taken this car through worse than that.”
The trooper straightened up. His face was out of sight but I could hear him. “The road is closed.”
My father sat with both hands on the wheel, rubbing the wood with his thumbs. He looked at the barricade for a long time. He seemed to be trying to master the idea of it. Then he thanked the trooper, and with a weird, old-maidy show of caution turned the car around. “Your mother will never forgive me for this,” he said.
“We should have left before,” I said. “Doctor.”
He didn’t speak to me again until we were in a booth at the diner, waiting for our burgers. “She won’t forgive me,” he said. “Do you understand? Never.”
“I guess,” I said, but no guesswork was required; she wouldn’t forgive him.
“I can’t let that happen.” He bent toward me. “I’ll tell you what I want. I want us all to be together again. Is that what you want?”
“Yes, sir.”
He bumped my chin with his knuckles. “That’s all I needed to hear.”
When we finished eating he went to the pay phone in the back of the diner, then joined me in the booth again. I figured he’d called my mother, but he didn’t give a report. He sipped at his coffee and stared out the window at the empty road. “Come on, come on,” he said, though not to me. A little while later he said it again. When the trooper’s car went past, lights flashing, he got up and dropped some money on the check. “Okay. Vamanos.”
The wind had died. The snow was falling straight down, less of it now and lighter. We drove away from the resort, right up to the barricade. “Move it,” my father told me. When I looked at him he said, “What are you waiting for?” I got out and dragged one of the sawhorses aside, then put it back after he drove through. He pushed the door open for me. “Now you’re an accomplice,” he said. “We go down together.” He put the car into gear and gave me a look. “Joke, son.”
Down the first long stretch I watched the road behind us, to see if the trooper was on our tail. The barricade vanished. Then there was nothing but snow: snow on the road, snow kicking up from the chains, snow on the trees, snow in the sky; and our trail in the snow. Then I faced forward and had a shock. The lay of the road behind us had been marked by our own tracks, but there were no tracks ahead of us. My father was breaking virgin snow between a line of tall trees. He was humming “Stars Fell on Alabama.” I felt snow brush along the floorboards under my feet. To keep my hands from shaking I clamped them between my knees.
My father grunted in a thoughtful way and said, “Don’t ever try this yourself.”
“I won’t.”
“That’s what you say now, but someday you’ll get your license and then you’ll think you can do anything. Only you won’t be able to do this. You need, I don’t know — a certain instinct.”
“Maybe I have it.”
“You don’t. You have your strong points, but not this. I only mention it because I don’t want you to get the idea this is something just anybody can do. I’m a great driver. That’s not a virtue, okay? It’s just a fact, and one you should be aware of. Of course you have to give the old heap some credit, too. There aren’t many cars I’d try this with. Listen!”
I did listen. I heard the slap of the chains, the stiff, jerky rasp of the wipers, the purr of the engine. It really did purr. The old heap was almost new. My father couldn’t afford it, and kept promising to sell it, but here it was.
I said, “Where do you think that policeman went to?”
“Are you warm enough?” He reached over and cranked up the blower. Then he turned off the wipers. We didn’t need them. The clouds had brightened. A few sparse, feathery flakes drifted into our slipstream and were swept away. We left the trees and entered a broad field of snow that ran level for a while and then tilted sharply downward. Orange stakes had been planted at intervals in two parallel lines and my father steered a course between them, though they were far enough apart to leave considerable doubt in my mind as to exactly where the road lay. He was humming again, doing little scat riffs around the melody.
“Okay then. What are my strong points?”
“Don’t get me started,” he said. “It’d take all day.”
“Oh, right. Name one.”
“Easy. You always think ahead.”
True. I always thought ahead. I was a boy who kept his clothes on numbered hangers to insure proper rotation. I bothered my teachers for homework assignments far ahead of their due dates so I could draw up schedules. I thought ahead, and that was why I knew that there would be other troopers waiting for us at the end of our ride, if we even got there. What I did not know was that my father would wheedle and plead his way past them — he didn’t sing “O Tannenbaum,” but just about — and get me home for dinner, buying a little more time before my mother decided to make the split final. I knew we’d get caught; I was resigned to it. And maybe for this reason I stopped moping and began to enjoy myself.
Why not? This was one for the books. Like being in a speedboat, only better. You can’t go downhill in a boat. And it was all ours. And it kept coming, the laden trees, the unbroken surface of snow, the sudden white vistas. Here and there I saw hints of the road, ditches, fences, stakes, but not so many that I could have found my way. But then I didn’t have to. My father was driving. My father in his forty-eighth year, rumpled, kind, bankrupt of honor, flushed with certainty. He was a great driver. All persuasion, no coercion. Such subtlety at the wheel, such tactful pedalwork. I actually trusted him. And the best was yet to come — switchbacks and hairpins impossible to describe. Except maybe to say this: if you haven’t driven fresh powder, you haven’t driven.
If this story were included in the chapter that explains plot, you might scratch your head a bit. The plot? A man and his son get caught in a snowstorm, drive down a harrowing road in defiance of the police, and survive, maybe even enjoy the ride. In a plot-heavy story, we would expect a car crash, perhaps followed by a full-throated argument between father and son, maybe even an arrest for driving on a forbidden road. The restrained plot in “Powder” gives the author ample room to develop rich and full characters in a relatively small space. There are a total of four characters in this story: the narrator, his father, his mother (who is not technically in the story, but whose invisible presence is significant), and the trooper. The mother and the trooper are minor characters who both represent the same oppositional force: they set the rules and parameters that the narrator’s father breaks. The story wouldn’t be the same without them: it might not even exist. They are minor, but significant in that the guidelines they set highlight the salient points of contact between the two main characters.
We evaluate fictional characters in much the same way we understand people in our own lives. By piecing together bits of information, we create a context that allows us to interpret their behavior. We can predict, for instance, that an acquaintance who is a chronic complainer is not likely to have anything good to say about a roommate. Complaints can be verbal or nonverbal: a rant and an eye-roll can convey similar gripes. One of the most crucial techniques to pay attention to in determining character is to observe the balance between dialogue and description. Dialogue simply refers to the words people speak in a story. Plays, as we discuss in Chapter 35 and beyond, are comprised almost entirely of dialogue, and yet an actor’s job on stage is rarely to stand stock still and recite dialogue: actors also wring their hands, run, slap each other, or stab each other while reciting their lines. When a character speaks in a short story, it is generally as part of a conversation, in reaction to something someone else has said. We can’t always control what we say in such situations: emotions, fatigue, drunkenness, or being caught off guard are all circumstances that might alter our expected words. In “Powder” the narrator and his father have some sort of in-joke: the narrator is supposed to respond, “Right, doctor” when his father says, “Right, doctor?” When he does not fill in this formula, we can assume that his father understands that his silence indicates extreme displeasure. Later on, he chides his father by adding “Doctor” to the stern sentence, “We should have left earlier,” probably after a measured pause. His choice to omit “doctor” from their conversation and then to include it when it isn’t called for are important clues to their relationship at this particular moment. We interpret words and actions in the light of what we already know about someone, and that is why keeping track of what characters say (and how they say it) along with what they do (and don’t do) is important. Characters have histories, habits, quirks, and psychological responses to their environments, all of which combine to tell us who they are.
In addition to dialogue, authors reveal characters by a wide variety of means. It should be noted that some stories are all description and some are all dialogue, but these cases are rare: most authors blend them, and in a very particular way. Try highlighting all the dialogue in two or three stories: do you notice any patterns about where it tends to be most prevalent?
Physical descriptions can indicate important inner qualities; disheveled appearance, a crafty smile, or a blush might communicate as much as or more than what a character says. Even clothing matters: in the parodic story “The Hit Man” by T. C. Boyle, the protagonist is always wearing black, especially his executioner’s hood: he wouldn’t be “the Hit Man” without this costume. Sometimes clothing can be an obvious indicator of character: in classic Western movies the good guys wore white hats and the bad guys wore black hats. More often, we are encouraged to attend to subtler traits based on context. If a character wears a bright, flowery dress to a somber funeral where everyone else is dressed in traditional black, is she clueless? Does she care little for convention? Is she ecstatic at the death of the deceased because she always hated him? Is she the type of person who believes we should celebrate someone’s life rather than mourn their passing? We would have to learn a little more about the character and the context for the funeral to decide. Characters can also be revealed by the words and actions of others who respond to them. In literature, moreover, we have one great advantage that life cannot offer; a work of fiction can give us access to a person’s thoughts, which may come in the form of fully formed sentences that look like dialogue or in incoherent partial sentences or word jumbles known as stream of consciousness. Although in Ralph Ellison’s “King of the Bingo Game” we learn about the protagonist primarily through descriptive details, words, actions, and his relationships with the other characters, Ellison allows us to enter the man’s consciousness. Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” is all dialogue, but it’s actually snippets of many conversations that have occurred over a period of time, and it’s certainly one-sided as dialogues go.
Authors have two major methods of presenting characters: showing and telling. Characters shown in dramatic situations reveal themselves indirectly by what they say and do. The general preference in modern fiction is to choose showing over telling when there is a choice. The art of fiction involves exercising the imagination, so fiction writers (like poets) gravitate toward images, or mental pictures. The narrator of Wolff’s story has the option of telling you the type of person his father is; he might say, “My father was a jazz enthusiast who loved me and my mom, but who was bad at fulfilling his duties to the point of reckless irresponsibility.” Instead, the author shows the father’s love of jazz: he once got in trouble for sneaking his son into a club to see the legendary Thelonious Monk, he hums “Stars Fell on Alabama” as they barrel through the virgin snow, he does “little scat riffs around the melody” as the drive continues. There are many illustrations of his love for his wife and son, but also of his irresponsibility. We detect a little clownishness in the story’s second paragraph when the father “promised, hand on heart, to take good care” of his son: the hand on heart is an insincere gesture, and we can almost picture his mother scowling in response, knowing how hollow the promise is after a lifetime of such behavior. In that same paragraph the father consults his watch after they take “several last runs” and is surprised by the time. The narrator isn’t. He’s been aware of the time all day, and worried about it.
By showing us the father’s character rather than telling it, the author is able to reveal a character patiently and subtly, and to offer some ambiguity as a result. If the narrator merely proclaimed his father “reckless and irresponsible,” we might be less likely to see his charms: his obvious joy in life, his confidence, his willingness to take risks. When he hums jazz tunes at a time that might seem stressful, we understand that he is a man bursting with positive energy: if the narrator just told us his father liked jazz, we might not intuit that trait. There are times, though, when telling is the most efficient or only possible way to communicate. The first sentence of the story — “Just before Christmas my father took me skiing at Mount Baker” — is all telling, and it’s necessary information for us to have. It doesn’t require interpretation: it’s simply a fact that the narrator must establish before the story can continue. In a first-person narrative like this one, we should always be wary of perspective, though, because the storyteller is also a character whose perspective might be limited or distorted by his or her involvement in the story. For example, late in the story the narrator asks his father to list the narrator’s “strong points.” If we were evaluating the narrator’s character at that moment, we might assume he’s a little insecure. His father initially deflects the question, saying, “Don’t get me started…. It’d take all day,” and the narrator responds, “Oh, right. Name one.” This response indicates either that possible insecurity or a scepticism that his father really values what he considers his strong points: their values are different. They seem to agree that one of the narrator’s strong points is that he “always think[s] ahead,” but the illustrations of this thinking ahead border on obsession or anxiety: do you know anyone who keeps their “clothes on numbered hangers to ensure proper rotation”? That’s a fairly extreme version of “thinking ahead,” to be generous. The narrator and his father tell us one thing but show us something slightly different. In this way, telling and showing complement each other.
Characters can be convincing whether they are presented by telling or showing, provided their actions are motivated. There must be reasons for how they behave and what they say. If adequate motivation is offered, we can understand and find plausible their actions no matter how bizarre. In “A Rose For Emily,” Faulkner makes Emily Grierson’s intimacy with a corpse credible by preparing us with information about her father’s death along with her inability to leave the past and live in the present. Emily turns out to be consistent. Although we are surprised by the ending of the story, the behavior it reveals is compatible with her temperament. Sometimes a character is motivated but unsure how best to achieve his or her goals and desires. The father in “Powder” says plainly, “I’ll tell you what I want. I want us all to be together again.” We are likely to believe him, but we also must question if he’s going about that goal the right way. He seems less concerned with considering his wife’s and son’s desires for a punctual Christmas Eve dinner than he is with his own need for adventure.
Some kinds of fiction consciously break away from our expectations of traditional realistic stories. Consistency, plausibility, and motivation are not very useful concepts for understanding and evaluating characterizations in modern absurdist literature, for instance, in which characters are often alienated from themselves and their environment in an irrational world. In this world there is no possibility for traditional heroic action; instead we find an antihero who has little control over events. T. C. Boyle’s protagonist in “The Hit Man” is petting a three-headed dog toward the story’s end. Gregor Samsa, the protagonist of Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” (1915), wakes up as a bug one morning and has to deal with the human world as an insect would. The narrator of John Barth’s story “Night-Sea Journey” is a sperm swimming toward an egg among millions of sperm just like him. These works force us to consider the notion of character in terms that derive less from our experience than from our capacity for imaginative understanding.
In most realistic stories we expect characters to act plausibly and in ways consistent with their personalities, but that does not mean that characters cannot develop and change. A dynamic character undergoes some kind of change because of the action of the plot. Huck Finn’s view of Jim, the runaway slave in Mark Twain’s novel, develops during their experiences on the raft. Huck discovers Jim’s humanity and, therefore, cannot betray him because Huck no longer sees his companion as merely the property of a white owner. On the other hand, Huck’s friend, Tom Sawyer, is a static character because he does not change. He remains interested only in high adventure, even at the risk of Jim’s life. As static characters often do, Tom serves as a foil to Huck; his frivolous concerns are contrasted with Huck’s serious development. A foil helps to reveal by contrast the distinctive qualities of another character. We can see a similar dynamic in “Powder.” The narrator’s father is static in the sense that he cannot or is not willing to change. It would seem that the narrator is also static in that it appears as if he is doomed to worry, perhaps as a way of compensating for his father’s tendency to break rules, but for a brief, important moment in the crucial final two paragraphs of the story he relaxes: “I stopped moping and began to enjoy myself.” Even if it’s a temporary change, we have to be a little relieved by this response. The easygoing, joyful final sentence of the story sounds more like his father than like him.
The protagonist in a story is usually a dynamic character who experiences some conflict that makes an impact on his or her life. Less commonly, static characters can also be protagonists. Rip Van Winkle wakes up from his twenty-year sleep in Washington Irving’s story to discover his family dramatically changed and his country no longer a British colony, but none of these important events has an impact on his character; he continues to be the same shiftless and idle man that he was before he fell asleep. The protagonist in Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” is also a static character; indeed, she rejects all change. The reader understands her changes, but she does not. Ordinarily, however, a plot contains one or two dynamic characters with any number of static characters in supporting roles. This is especially true of short stories, in which brevity limits the possibilities of character development.
The extent to which a character is developed is another means by which character can be analyzed. The novelist E. M. Forster coined the terms flat and round to distinguish degrees of character development. A flat character embodies one or two qualities, ideas, or traits that can be readily described in a brief summary. For instance, the trooper in “Powder” might be a fascinating guy at home with an extensive collection of rare artwork and the ability to juggle running chainsaws, but in this story his role is to say, “The road is closed,” and to haunt the narrator’s worried mind thereafter. He’s just a cop, doing his job. Flat characters tend to be one-dimensional. They are readily accessible because their characteristics are few and simple; they are not created to be psychologically complex.
Some flat characters are immediately recognizable as stock characters. These stereotypes are particularly popular in formula fiction, television programs, and action movies. Stock characters are types rather than individuals. The poor but dedicated writer falls in love with a hard-working understudy, who gets nowhere because the corrupt producer favors his boozy, pampered mistress for the leading role. Characters such as these — the loyal servant, the mean stepfather, the henpecked husband, the dumb blonde, the sadistic army officer, the dotty grandmother — are prepackaged; they lack individuality because their authors have, in a sense, not imaginatively created them but simply summoned them from a warehouse of clichés and social prejudices. Stock characters can become fresh if a good writer makes them vivid, interesting, or memorable, but too often a writer’s use of these stereotypes is simply weak characterization.
Round characters are more complex than flat or stock characters. Round characters have more depth and require more attention. They may surprise us or puzzle us. Although they are more fully developed, round characters are also more difficult to summarize because we are aware of competing ideas, values, and possibilities in their lives. As a flat character, Huck Finn’s alcoholic, bigoted father is clear to us; we know that Pap is the embodiment of racism and irrationality. But Huck is considerably less predictable because he struggles with what Twain calls a “sound heart and a deformed conscience.”
An author’s use of a flat character — even as a protagonist — does not necessarily represent an artistic flaw. It might be a conscious choice so that we pay even closer attention to the dynamic, round characters in the story, particularly as they interact with flat characters. Moreover, both flat and round characters can be either dynamic or static. Each plot can be made most effective by its own special kind of characterization. Terms such as round and flat are helpful tools to use to determine what we know about a character, but they are not an infallible measurement of the quality of a story.
The next three stories — Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl,” Xu Xi’s “Famine,” and James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” — offer character studies worthy of close analysis. As you read them, notice the methods of characterization used to bring each to life.