I decided to take up Andy Walsh's challenge to list 15 fictional characters who have influenced me. Note that they are not THE 15, but 15 out of many characters I've met in books or watched on TV or in the movies. These are characters who have become reference points for me - and also as shared reference points with members of my family. In fact, the characters who serve as a kind of short-hand for family discussions of values: Roark, for independence; Ayla, for adventure; Frodo, for overcoming evil - are the ones that stand out from the rest.
I was struck, as I undertook this, that I was writing a kind of autobiography. The bulk of the books mentioned here come from my childhood and youth. Others are books I've read together with Jacquie and Matt and Jim. Only a couple come from books I read by myself as an adult - although I've read a lot of novels and short stories and seen a lot of movies.
This is also a different question than what authors have influenced me. If I were to put in an "honorable mention", I'd like to say that the first week in April in 1992, Matt, Jim and I all mourned the passing of William Gaines, the publisher of MAD magazine, and Isaac Asimov, whose Foundation and Robot books meant so much to all three of us.
Finally, I've left biblical characters out of this list entirely, such as the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan and - pace fundamentalists - Adam and Eve, too. I guess I just wanted to prove that I also read other books.
Here are my fictional characters:
I was struck, as I undertook this, that I was writing a kind of autobiography. The bulk of the books mentioned here come from my childhood and youth. Others are books I've read together with Jacquie and Matt and Jim. Only a couple come from books I read by myself as an adult - although I've read a lot of novels and short stories and seen a lot of movies.
This is also a different question than what authors have influenced me. If I were to put in an "honorable mention", I'd like to say that the first week in April in 1992, Matt, Jim and I all mourned the passing of William Gaines, the publisher of MAD magazine, and Isaac Asimov, whose Foundation and Robot books meant so much to all three of us.
Finally, I've left biblical characters out of this list entirely, such as the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan and - pace fundamentalists - Adam and Eve, too. I guess I just wanted to prove that I also read other books.
Here are my fictional characters:
1. Ollie:
I asked my mother to read The Little Boy with the Big Horn to me over and over again. Ollie's search for a place to practice playing his tuba without bothering his mother, the townspeople, or the cows in the country, led him to row a boat out into the ocean. As he practiced in the fog, his horn alerted a big passenger ship that it was too close to the rocks. Ollie went from being a problem to a hero! The attraction of that story is still inexplicable to me, but at a certain point, both my grandsons read it over and over again, too. Maybe every little boy feels like a problem and longs to be a hero, instead.
I asked my mother to read The Little Boy with the Big Horn to me over and over again. Ollie's search for a place to practice playing his tuba without bothering his mother, the townspeople, or the cows in the country, led him to row a boat out into the ocean. As he practiced in the fog, his horn alerted a big passenger ship that it was too close to the rocks. Ollie went from being a problem to a hero! The attraction of that story is still inexplicable to me, but at a certain point, both my grandsons read it over and over again, too. Maybe every little boy feels like a problem and longs to be a hero, instead.
2. Davy Crockett:
Technically, Davy was a historical figure, but in technicolor, he was definitely a fictional character. Actually, the real Davy Crockett was, in many ways, a fictional character of his own creation.
When the first Fess Parker film arrived at our local movie theater, we couldn't even get in - the place was sold out the first night. We got there early the second night. My most prized gifts for my seventh birthday were a coonskin cap (fake) and a matchlock pistol (also fake).The image of Davy swinging his rifle as the Mexican army overran the Alamo is like an icon through which I see courage and dedication to a cause bigger than oneself. When Fess Parker died last year, I felt genuine sadness.
Looking back, the continuing significance of Davy Crockett for me is that he taught me about how fact and legend mix. He taught me that even answering the simple question, "how did your day go?" means selecting what to tell and what not to tell and how to frame and arrange the narrative. In order to say something true about our day, we create fictions, just as Walt Disney and Davy Crockett, himself, created fictions to say something true about life on the wild frontier. It's not the only truth. The Creek tribe and the Mexicans have their own versions of that story and encountering those stories later in life taught me a lot about the nature of truth, too.
3. Superman:
In contrast to Davy, Superman is a real fictional character - the product of imagination. I spent a lot of hours with Superman, both in his televised incarnation and reading practically every issue of the comic book from 1957-1961. When I was in elementary school, I spent a lot of time thinking about how to fly. Did I need a real cape? Maybe if I just jumped off something higher? As an adolescent, I coveted his X-ray vision - but I won't go into that. Superman taught me the limits of what is humanly possible. In some ways, I still wrestle with those limits. I suspect people wrestled with those limits before Siegel and Schuster invented Superman in a little house just a few blocks north of where I'm sitting right now. They gave a name and an image to an aspiration we all have to transcend the limits of human strength.
3. Robert A. Heinlein's Young Man:
This guy ranged in age from about 16 to 24 and appeared in Heinlein's science fiction novels under various names. Sure they were different characters, but they were really all the same young man. He was always underestimating his intelligence and courage. He was always curious about space and other planets. He might win a space suit in a contest, live on Mars, become a homesteader on a moon of Jupiter, use his telepathic powers to communicate with his twin brother across light years of space, or join an interplanetary army and wear an exoskeleton that enabled him to leap tall buildings at a single bound. These guys all had mentors who taught them how to solve problems with the principles of math and engineering. They lived in worlds dedicated to libertarian ideals, where everyone, for example, carried a gun - the mentally ill, the lazy and the impolite were eliminated by the "harsh mistress" of a dangerous environment. This is fiction, after all - and Heinlein's vision sure beats Ayn Rand's.
In some ways, this young man represents roads I did not travel into science, technology and a different philosophy of life; all of which have their attractions. Ultimately, I had to decide that wasn't the road for me and choosing not to go that way gives me more ownership of the path I did follow into words, tradition and community.
4. Roseasharn:
Actually, I'd include the whole Joad family in Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, but the daughter, Rose of Sharon, whom her family calls "Roseasharn" stands out if only because of the final scene in the book. I was fortunate to go to a high school that did not require us to read books like this for class. They were left for us to discover in the library - or not (see Holden Caulfield below). I came to the novel without any context to put it in. It would be years before I learned that the author won the Nobel Prize for Literature. I just knew that the novel was like a punch in the gut. It awakened my social conscience. It's one reason why I didn't become Heinlein's young man.
5. Winston Smith:
1984, like The Grapes of Wrath, was just a book I took off the school library shelves. It taught me everything I need to know about propaganda and political speech. It made even more sense when I later learned that Orwell had chosen the title by reversing the numbers in 1948, the year it was published and the year I was born and the year that the U.S. War Department became the "Defense" Department.
But it was Smith and his struggle to find some privacy and truth and love in an environment that had redefined lies as truth and hate as love and war as peace and where every room was scanned by Big Brother, that really influenced me. I think of him every time I drive past a stoplight camera or stand with my legs spread apart and my hands behind my head in the airport security zone. (I can't think of Winston without also thinking of John, the Savage, in Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley. There are days when I feel as alienated from the values of my culture as John did from the superficial world of Soma and Fordism and Winston from the world of Big Brother.)
6. Holden Caulfield:
Again, growing up in an extremely conservative and backward school district has its advantages. The Catcher in the Rye was in the backroom of the high school library. A kind of inner sanctum where certain Juniors and Seniors were allowed to take out books that shouldn't fall into the hands of more impressionable students. So, I really ate it up. The recent shooting death of that 9-year-old girl in Tuscon reminded me once again of Holden's desire to stand in the rye field at the edge of the world and catch the little kids before they fell over the edge.
6. Screwtape:
I also found C. S. Lewis in high school. Screwtape, the senior devil writing to his bungling nephew who is a kind of "guardian devil" to a young man who unfortunately becomes a Christian, introduced me to irony, satire and theology. I still return to Screwtape to remind myself that sometimes we see the truth best from the underside. And we tell it best with our tongue in our cheek.
7. Meursault:
Albert Camus' novel, The Stranger, wasn't even on the shelves in the library's back room. I think our librarian must have kept it under lock and key. There were stories about adolescents who killed themselves after reading it. When she offered it to me, I jumped at the chance to read it.
I knew I was reading something I did not understand. Camus pushed me and stretched me. I made all kinds of judgments about Meursault based on my limited world view as a Methodist farm boy growing up in Appalachia, but I also loved being pushed by his bizarre behavior and callousness - smoking while viewing his mother's dead body, his willingness to engage in cruelty and murder for no apparent reason. He taught me that there were people in this world whom I would never fully understand. There were world views that I hadn't even heard of yet. There were people who lived beyond the horizon of my experience. I've spent my life journeying toward that horizon trying to find what is on the other side either through literature or through personal contacts with people who are different from me.
8. The Bear
Faulkner's short novel by the same name tells the story of the Boy who goes hunting for the bear in the forest. We read it in college freshman English. The guy who sat beside me had already read it in high school and he was pretty condescending to me because I had never even heard of Faulkner. But I got an "A" on the paper we wrote and he got a "C" (not that things like that matter to me or anything). It taught me that I had a talent for something that I never even knew existed. I was able to read narratives and find deeper meanings in them.
I was reminded of The Bear, just last week when I was telling my 4-year-old grandson, Ziv, about 4 encounters I've had with bears in the hills along the border between southwestern New York (where Jacquie and I grew up) and northwestern Pennsylvania (where we camp every summer). Bears are like God in the Torah. You seldom see the Bear. When you do, it's usually only a glimpse as he disappears ahead of you. But the Bear always inspires awe, and when you know that he really is somewhere in those dark woods, it changes everything.
9. Aslan:
Even though I read just about everything by C.S. Lewis that I could get my hands on, I didn't read the Narnia novels until I read them to our sons. Matt was about 7 when I started reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Jim was about 4. I started reading to Matt, but Jim listened and after a couple of nights it was clear that he was as deeply engaged in the story as any of us. By the time we finished the series, we had established a family ritual of reading together that Jacquie and I continue when we are on vacation and both Jim and Matt continue with their families, as well. I admit that I've grown somewhat less enamored with Aslan himself as I've grown older. Lewis presents a Manichean vision in which some characters are all good and some are all evil and seems to buy into the myth of redemptive violence in ways that probably have more in common with Davy Crockett and Superman than with the Lamb who was slain (Rev. 2).
10. Frodo:
We followed Lewis with Tolkien and our kids kept up. Again, The Lord of the Ring trilogy was not on my reading list when I was young (or even in our school library, although Jacquie had an outstanding 4th grade teacher who read the Hobbit to her class). Tolkien's vision of good and evil is more nuanced than Lewis'. Frodo struggles with the temptation of the ring and even Gollum has some redeeming qualities.
11. Ayla
Eventually our family read together The Clan of the Cave Bear and Valley of the Horses by Jean Auel. Ayla, the main character is a Cro-Magnon who was adopted as a small child by a clan of Neanderthals. The second book of this series is a kind of romance novel. This is how our sons got their sex education. Ayla's discovery of her abilities to domesticate animals and to invent new ways of solving problems contrasted with her experiences with the Neanderthals raises all kinds of questions about what it means to be human. Anthropology has made great strides since these books were written (I just read that Auel plans to publish the last book in the series in 2011) but just thinking about people living in communities tens of thousands of years before "civilization" began has been as humbling as gazing at stars whose light left them thousands of years ago.
12. Howard Roark:
I made fun of Ayn Rand above, but her novel The Fountainhead, was a book all four of us read at different times in our lives and, for our family, it's a point of reference. Jacquie, Matt and Jim read it in high school. I didn't get to it until my 30's. The contrast between the visionary and uncompromising Roark and his contemporary, Peter Keating, who is described as a "second-hander" continues to influence me and prick my conscience whenever I just go along with the way everyone else thinks.
13. Henry James:
OK, Henry James was a real person, brother of the philosopher, William James, and one of the greatest novelists and short story writers in the English language. He is also a character in Colm Tóibín's novel, The Master. Jacquie and I read this together last year and I continue to think of the subtlety of Henry James' observation of human nature and his creative use of those observations as well as the way he handled his sexual orientation in a time and world that did not allow him to ever express it.
14. Fredrik Welin
This character appears in a novel called Italian Shoes, by Henning Mankell, who is probably better known for his crime novels featuring a detective named, Kurt Wallender. Mankell is the Swedish crime novelist who isn't Stieg Larsson.
Welin is a failed orthopedic surgeon in his early 60's, who lives alone on the coast of Sweden with his dog in a small cottage. Every day during the winter, he cuts a hole in the ice and immerses himself in the freezing water in order to both feel something and, I think, to numb himself, as well. He always keeps the door to the dining room shut because there is a giant anthill growing in the middle of the floor. The novel advances as it unravels the mystery about why Welin lives this way and how he eventually deals with his failure, rebuilds a relationship with his daughter and starts living again. I read this novel a couple of years ago, and Welin continues to be a touchstone for me.
15. Odysseus:
Didn't know where to put this guy. He's kind of the alpha and the omega of my fictional characters. I ran into his story first in the World Book Encyclopedia that I read from cover to cover to cover to . . . throughout elementary school. I knew his story years before I learned how to correctly pronounce his name. I read the Fitzgerald translation of The Odyssey in a college English class even as I was slowly translating parts of the Iliad in 3rd year Greek. And, recently, when I've visited my grandchildren, I've read stories about Odysseus to them. I just had a discussion with my four year old grandson about Scylla and Charybdis. If a story lives for 3,000 years and appeals to 4-year-olds and Ph.D.'s it must be good. Odysseus' desire to return home, his fidelity to Penelope (in his fashion) and his overcoming of all the barriers put in his way continues to intrigue and inspire me.
In contrast to Davy, Superman is a real fictional character - the product of imagination. I spent a lot of hours with Superman, both in his televised incarnation and reading practically every issue of the comic book from 1957-1961. When I was in elementary school, I spent a lot of time thinking about how to fly. Did I need a real cape? Maybe if I just jumped off something higher? As an adolescent, I coveted his X-ray vision - but I won't go into that. Superman taught me the limits of what is humanly possible. In some ways, I still wrestle with those limits. I suspect people wrestled with those limits before Siegel and Schuster invented Superman in a little house just a few blocks north of where I'm sitting right now. They gave a name and an image to an aspiration we all have to transcend the limits of human strength.
3. Robert A. Heinlein's Young Man:
This guy ranged in age from about 16 to 24 and appeared in Heinlein's science fiction novels under various names. Sure they were different characters, but they were really all the same young man. He was always underestimating his intelligence and courage. He was always curious about space and other planets. He might win a space suit in a contest, live on Mars, become a homesteader on a moon of Jupiter, use his telepathic powers to communicate with his twin brother across light years of space, or join an interplanetary army and wear an exoskeleton that enabled him to leap tall buildings at a single bound. These guys all had mentors who taught them how to solve problems with the principles of math and engineering. They lived in worlds dedicated to libertarian ideals, where everyone, for example, carried a gun - the mentally ill, the lazy and the impolite were eliminated by the "harsh mistress" of a dangerous environment. This is fiction, after all - and Heinlein's vision sure beats Ayn Rand's.
In some ways, this young man represents roads I did not travel into science, technology and a different philosophy of life; all of which have their attractions. Ultimately, I had to decide that wasn't the road for me and choosing not to go that way gives me more ownership of the path I did follow into words, tradition and community.
4. Roseasharn:
Actually, I'd include the whole Joad family in Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, but the daughter, Rose of Sharon, whom her family calls "Roseasharn" stands out if only because of the final scene in the book. I was fortunate to go to a high school that did not require us to read books like this for class. They were left for us to discover in the library - or not (see Holden Caulfield below). I came to the novel without any context to put it in. It would be years before I learned that the author won the Nobel Prize for Literature. I just knew that the novel was like a punch in the gut. It awakened my social conscience. It's one reason why I didn't become Heinlein's young man.
5. Winston Smith:
1984, like The Grapes of Wrath, was just a book I took off the school library shelves. It taught me everything I need to know about propaganda and political speech. It made even more sense when I later learned that Orwell had chosen the title by reversing the numbers in 1948, the year it was published and the year I was born and the year that the U.S. War Department became the "Defense" Department.
But it was Smith and his struggle to find some privacy and truth and love in an environment that had redefined lies as truth and hate as love and war as peace and where every room was scanned by Big Brother, that really influenced me. I think of him every time I drive past a stoplight camera or stand with my legs spread apart and my hands behind my head in the airport security zone. (I can't think of Winston without also thinking of John, the Savage, in Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley. There are days when I feel as alienated from the values of my culture as John did from the superficial world of Soma and Fordism and Winston from the world of Big Brother.)
6. Holden Caulfield:
Again, growing up in an extremely conservative and backward school district has its advantages. The Catcher in the Rye was in the backroom of the high school library. A kind of inner sanctum where certain Juniors and Seniors were allowed to take out books that shouldn't fall into the hands of more impressionable students. So, I really ate it up. The recent shooting death of that 9-year-old girl in Tuscon reminded me once again of Holden's desire to stand in the rye field at the edge of the world and catch the little kids before they fell over the edge.
6. Screwtape:
I also found C. S. Lewis in high school. Screwtape, the senior devil writing to his bungling nephew who is a kind of "guardian devil" to a young man who unfortunately becomes a Christian, introduced me to irony, satire and theology. I still return to Screwtape to remind myself that sometimes we see the truth best from the underside. And we tell it best with our tongue in our cheek.
7. Meursault:
Albert Camus' novel, The Stranger, wasn't even on the shelves in the library's back room. I think our librarian must have kept it under lock and key. There were stories about adolescents who killed themselves after reading it. When she offered it to me, I jumped at the chance to read it.
I knew I was reading something I did not understand. Camus pushed me and stretched me. I made all kinds of judgments about Meursault based on my limited world view as a Methodist farm boy growing up in Appalachia, but I also loved being pushed by his bizarre behavior and callousness - smoking while viewing his mother's dead body, his willingness to engage in cruelty and murder for no apparent reason. He taught me that there were people in this world whom I would never fully understand. There were world views that I hadn't even heard of yet. There were people who lived beyond the horizon of my experience. I've spent my life journeying toward that horizon trying to find what is on the other side either through literature or through personal contacts with people who are different from me.
8. The Bear
Faulkner's short novel by the same name tells the story of the Boy who goes hunting for the bear in the forest. We read it in college freshman English. The guy who sat beside me had already read it in high school and he was pretty condescending to me because I had never even heard of Faulkner. But I got an "A" on the paper we wrote and he got a "C" (not that things like that matter to me or anything). It taught me that I had a talent for something that I never even knew existed. I was able to read narratives and find deeper meanings in them.
I was reminded of The Bear, just last week when I was telling my 4-year-old grandson, Ziv, about 4 encounters I've had with bears in the hills along the border between southwestern New York (where Jacquie and I grew up) and northwestern Pennsylvania (where we camp every summer). Bears are like God in the Torah. You seldom see the Bear. When you do, it's usually only a glimpse as he disappears ahead of you. But the Bear always inspires awe, and when you know that he really is somewhere in those dark woods, it changes everything.
9. Aslan:
Even though I read just about everything by C.S. Lewis that I could get my hands on, I didn't read the Narnia novels until I read them to our sons. Matt was about 7 when I started reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Jim was about 4. I started reading to Matt, but Jim listened and after a couple of nights it was clear that he was as deeply engaged in the story as any of us. By the time we finished the series, we had established a family ritual of reading together that Jacquie and I continue when we are on vacation and both Jim and Matt continue with their families, as well. I admit that I've grown somewhat less enamored with Aslan himself as I've grown older. Lewis presents a Manichean vision in which some characters are all good and some are all evil and seems to buy into the myth of redemptive violence in ways that probably have more in common with Davy Crockett and Superman than with the Lamb who was slain (Rev. 2).
10. Frodo:
We followed Lewis with Tolkien and our kids kept up. Again, The Lord of the Ring trilogy was not on my reading list when I was young (or even in our school library, although Jacquie had an outstanding 4th grade teacher who read the Hobbit to her class). Tolkien's vision of good and evil is more nuanced than Lewis'. Frodo struggles with the temptation of the ring and even Gollum has some redeeming qualities.
11. Ayla
Eventually our family read together The Clan of the Cave Bear and Valley of the Horses by Jean Auel. Ayla, the main character is a Cro-Magnon who was adopted as a small child by a clan of Neanderthals. The second book of this series is a kind of romance novel. This is how our sons got their sex education. Ayla's discovery of her abilities to domesticate animals and to invent new ways of solving problems contrasted with her experiences with the Neanderthals raises all kinds of questions about what it means to be human. Anthropology has made great strides since these books were written (I just read that Auel plans to publish the last book in the series in 2011) but just thinking about people living in communities tens of thousands of years before "civilization" began has been as humbling as gazing at stars whose light left them thousands of years ago.
12. Howard Roark:
I made fun of Ayn Rand above, but her novel The Fountainhead, was a book all four of us read at different times in our lives and, for our family, it's a point of reference. Jacquie, Matt and Jim read it in high school. I didn't get to it until my 30's. The contrast between the visionary and uncompromising Roark and his contemporary, Peter Keating, who is described as a "second-hander" continues to influence me and prick my conscience whenever I just go along with the way everyone else thinks.
13. Henry James:
OK, Henry James was a real person, brother of the philosopher, William James, and one of the greatest novelists and short story writers in the English language. He is also a character in Colm Tóibín's novel, The Master. Jacquie and I read this together last year and I continue to think of the subtlety of Henry James' observation of human nature and his creative use of those observations as well as the way he handled his sexual orientation in a time and world that did not allow him to ever express it.
14. Fredrik Welin
This character appears in a novel called Italian Shoes, by Henning Mankell, who is probably better known for his crime novels featuring a detective named, Kurt Wallender. Mankell is the Swedish crime novelist who isn't Stieg Larsson.
Welin is a failed orthopedic surgeon in his early 60's, who lives alone on the coast of Sweden with his dog in a small cottage. Every day during the winter, he cuts a hole in the ice and immerses himself in the freezing water in order to both feel something and, I think, to numb himself, as well. He always keeps the door to the dining room shut because there is a giant anthill growing in the middle of the floor. The novel advances as it unravels the mystery about why Welin lives this way and how he eventually deals with his failure, rebuilds a relationship with his daughter and starts living again. I read this novel a couple of years ago, and Welin continues to be a touchstone for me.
15. Odysseus:
Didn't know where to put this guy. He's kind of the alpha and the omega of my fictional characters. I ran into his story first in the World Book Encyclopedia that I read from cover to cover to cover to . . . throughout elementary school. I knew his story years before I learned how to correctly pronounce his name. I read the Fitzgerald translation of The Odyssey in a college English class even as I was slowly translating parts of the Iliad in 3rd year Greek. And, recently, when I've visited my grandchildren, I've read stories about Odysseus to them. I just had a discussion with my four year old grandson about Scylla and Charybdis. If a story lives for 3,000 years and appeals to 4-year-olds and Ph.D.'s it must be good. Odysseus' desire to return home, his fidelity to Penelope (in his fashion) and his overcoming of all the barriers put in his way continues to intrigue and inspire me.
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