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ENG45C, Character Development, : - Coggle Diagram

- - - - She jumps from back-to-back marriages
        
        Tea Cake (Husband #3): A love marriage to a younger man, offering her genuine companionship. They shared emotional depth and lots of joy, although he did have his flaws. He gambled, flirted with other women, and hit Janie, but they loved each other as equals, unlike the other marriages.
        
        Resolution: Janie finds true happiness & self-knowledge, culminating in her tragic & impactful moment of shooting him to save herself. Showing her strength and true independence. She finally becomes okay with being alone.
        
        Joe (Husband #2): Marries Joe, who is a charismatic, controlling mayor who stifles Jaine's voice, but brings a lot of status. She is put on display as a beautiful object and is demanded to be silent & submissive. His death allows Janie to remove her restrictions and reclaim her voice, something she had lost in the marriage.
        
        Logan (Husband #1): Arranged marriage by her grandma for security with a wealthy farmer. He treated her like a child and controlled her. She ends up leaving him because of a lack of love & respect.
  - - - The governess feels alone in the aspect of seeing things and noticing that things are off. No one believes her.
        
        Questions herself and the supernatural activity! Is the haunting real or a figment of her mind? Are the ghosts a projection of her own thoughts?
        
        Knowledge can corrupt you!
        
        Adam & Eve got kicked out of heaven! (Paradise Lost)
        
        Governess obsessive focus on seeing ghosts possibly led to Miles' death
        
        Causing him to feel extreme terror & potentially driving her to smother him in misguided attempts of trying to "save" him
        
        Her frantic, possessive actions ultimately overwhelmed the boy! Making her more of a destructive force, rather than a savior.
        
        Savior vs. Destroyer
        
        Nurture vs. Obsession
  - - - Waiting endlessly for a mysterious figure named Godot to arrive, not knowing who Godot is and whether or not he will actually be coming. The unknown figure Godot reflects their own ignorance & the play’s mystery.
      - Featuring a desolate setting, cyclical dialogue, and a bleakly comic view of human existence. The characters' wait is filled with repetitive actions, philosophical musings, and encounters with other characters like Pozzo and Lucky
      - The play itself seems to have a lack of progress with conversation loops, memory blurs, and events being repeated. Just an endless cycle of waiting.
        
        Repetition: Circular conversations about boots, hats, and suicide, the recurring arrival of Pozzo and Lucky, and the message that Godot will come "tomorrow." The phrases: "Shall we go?" "Yes, let's go." The only real difference noticed is the change of leaves from the 1st act to the 2nd act. At the beginning of the 2nd act, there are a few leaves, although it had only been the next morning.
      - They really wanted to leave, but they seemed stuck, as if they could not move.
- - - - Mrs. Dalloway: Clarissa is obsessed with class hierarchy, parties, guest lists, and proximity to the Prime Minister, which is used as a measure of worth.
        
        Elite class performance vs. Ethical/emotional emptiness
      - The Man of the Crowd: The narrator is assessing the city and categorizing people who are hustling and bustling past him by class "types," such as clerks, merchants, beggars, etc. By doing so, he is assigning them characters and moral qualities just through their appearance and occupation. The mysterious man resists classification, which hints at how shallow and unreliable these status-based readings really are.
        
        Gaining specific intrigue by a man, to the point that the older man was "craving desire to keep the man in view to know more of him." The man he was hyper-fixating on was a "decrepit old man, some sixty-five or seventy years of age." Making this story a Detective fiction.
        
        This stalking raises the question of why the narrator wanted to follow this older man so badly. Out of all the people in the busy city, why him? What was he gaining from following this man around?
        
        This idea connects to obsession, which connects the novel The Turn of the Screw, as the Governess was also gaining an obsessive trait with the possible supernatural presence of the ghosts. "The Man of the Crowd" focuses on death in very subtle ways and expresses feelings of claustrophobia and feeling stuck.
        
        Labeling both The Turn of the Screw and "The Man of the Crowd" as Gothic novels. :warning: As they are both stories of terror & suspense, set in a gloomy setting.
    - - Their Eyes Were Watching God: Janie's situation falls into all of the categories in the external section. She is pushed into marriages that promise her respectability & status.
        
        Her arc eventually exposes how those ideals can suffocate Black women's autonomy and happiness. She was able to grow out of the ideals that were pushed onto her from others, especially her grandmother. Every impactful and well written story showcases a message and a healthy character arc.
    - - Things Fall Apart: This is another sector that Okonkwo can be heavily categorized into! He expresses much more pressure on his son, Nwoye and then later on Ikemefuna, as they are men. He values men at a higher level, something very normal for the 19th century.
        
        Titles and masculine honor vs. Ethical responsibility and flexibility
  - - - The Dead: Gabriel's self-worth and his value are affected as his cultured and superior status is punctured at the end with the unraveling of Gretta's ex-lover, Michael Furey, revealing how fragile and performative his social standing really is. His social polish is revealed as emotionally hollow, so that moral intensity and authentic feeling belong not to the socially “successful,” but to the obscure, dead boy
        
        It was easy for him to second guess himself and the idea of himself. His self status was effected by the discovery.
        
        Self-image vs. Genuine emotional courage
      - Things Fall Apart: Titles, yams, warrior prestige, and masculine hardness give men importance in their status in Umuofia. Okonkwo obsesses over these different factors as proof of his own worth, holding his son to the same toxic standards.
        
        The novel raises questions on whether these expectations for status code is really grounds for the violence that he commits towards his family and Ikemefuna? He displays the idea of how rigid honor can lead to tragedy. How that power than get to someones head.
        
        Okonkwo being able to kill a boy who is like his son just for status and because of the oracle. Makes you wonder how twisted his mind really is and how much he fears being viewed as weak. He thinks a lot about the idea of how he is perceived and what may happen if people see him as "lazy," "poor," or "unaccomplished."
        
        He would rather commit suicide, than see what the village has become. He could not be under other power, possibly tied to his demand for control and not wanting to be viewed as weak.
        
        Exploring the idea of wether Okonkwo is a hero or a villain. He is portrayed as a hero, for the most part, but acts out of selfish intent, which makes me wonder if he can be categorized as a hero.
        
        His downfall highlights the dangers of toxic masculinity.
        
        Okonkwo’s relentless pursuit of titles and distance from Unoka’s failure, framing status as both aspiration and trap.
    - - The Sound of the Fury: The Compsons are trying their best to cling to a decaying aristocratic name and racial hierarchy, assuming that their whiteness and lineage make them superior to others. Making excuses and assuming it is okay to behave cruelly and self-destructively.
        
        Dilsey, a Black servant who holds little formal status, quietly embodies endurance and moral steadiness, making a change for the link between rank and goodness.
        
        White aristocratic name vs. Actual moral decay
- - - - The Turn of the Screw & "The Man of the Crowd" use 1st person narrators whose illness, obsession, & self-presentation make their narrative hard to believe and doubtful. The supposed "ghosts" and the "mysterious man" can be understood as projections of their own minds rather than real external facts.
      - "Bartleby" is narrated by the lawyer, who cannot enter Bartleby's interior thoughts, so the story turns into the lawyer's interpreted, limited, and moral evasions rather than being about Bartleby's "true" motives.
      - “Oread,” “Sea Rose,” “The Red Wheelbarrow” - These imagist poems give you intense, partial snapshots rather than full stories, so narration becomes a fractured act of showing rather than telling.
    - - Mrs. Dalloway and The Sound of the Fury both shift focalization and have a stream of consciousness way of writing that shows that reality is always only partial, coming from many minds instead of just one. Woolf's free indirect discourse & Faulkner's novel, split up into four sections, demonstrate how the same world is utterly different from all different points of view.
      - Things Fall Apart uses the style of an omniscient narrator, but carefully moves in & out of the different characters' heads and Igbo oral styles. This reveals both the internal logic and ideas of the culture and the misreadings that occur as colonial power imposes a new narrative on it.
        
        Omniscient narrator: An "all-knowing storyteller who is outside of the plot and can reveal the inner thoughts, feelings, and secrets of any of the characters, events, or time period.
    - - Their Eyes Were Watching God is framed as Janie telling her life story to Pheoby, while a 3rd person narrator slips in between her voice with a broader perspective. This blend highlights whose story is being told, who gets to retell it, and how the voice is tied to agency.
      - "The Dead" uses close 3rd person around Gabriel at just a party, then slowly expands into a more reflective, almost omniscient lyrical mode, making for a shifting movement from a narrow, self-satisfied viewpoint to a broader awareness of other lives and histories.
    - - Waiting for Godot uses dialogue and stage directions as a tool to demonstrate collective narrations on stage. The characters are confused, continuously looping around over and over again while talking, which enacts the failure of narrative progress. There is no stable present, only the use of repeated attempts to make sense.
      - Across a large amount of the pieces read, the narration often highlights isolation as an overarching theme; the governess alone with her visions, the Poe and Melville narrators alone with their fixations, Gabriel alone in a crowded room, Janie and Okonkwo struggling against the stories others impose on them. (refer to the isolation branch for more)
- - - - “In a Station of the Metro” (Pound) – A brief relationship between individual faces and an anonymous urban crowd; where the fading, blur-like vision of “these faces” are put against an impersonal backdrop. Working well with "Man of the Crowd" in how it turns watching into a moment of weird, aesthetic contact.
    - - Pozzo and Lucky also have an interesting dynamic, as they show a sense of hierarchy to Vladimir and Estragon, feeling a bit disturbing and exaggerating the feeling of being stuck and unmoved that both the characters and the audience feel.
  - - - Janie's relationship with Tea Cake is more mutual, playful, & loving, yet is still marked by violence and tragedy, which complicates the simple ideal of romantic fulfillment.
        
        What traits are attracting these men who believe that they have some type of ownership over her? To believe that they have the right to do as they please? Even Tea Cup displays this by abusing her, lacking the full amount of respect a marriage should have.
    - - Dilsey's caregiving exposes how "family" is upheld by radicalized labor rather than affection alone.
  - - - Hughes: “I, Too,” “Let America Be America Again,” “The N Artist and the Racial Mountain” – These are about the relationship between Black subjects and “America” as an idea and a power structure. The speaker claims kinship (“I, too, am America”) while criticizing the act of being left out. Pairing closely with ideas from Things Fall Apart and Their Eyes Were Watching God