Analyzing the Characters of Waterland :: Waterland Essays

Analyzing the Characters of Waterland In Waterland Swift weaves a magical yet haunting tale of everyday characters who live through theyre own struggles and problems unadorned by the entangledity of world history yet forever revolving around the isolated and mysterious Fenns. His characters ar a formidable mix of the stereotyped and the unordinary as he shows us how even the or so common person can lead the strangest and most complex life and display a vast range of opposed emotions and thoughts. Waterland is a profound study of human nature that not only displays the intricacies of people besides also analyses the men and woman that live among us and for which each of us can find a name. Thus we all know an Ernest Atkinson, a bourgeois born into wealth who finds a meaning in life in the texts of Marx which push him to oppose the life that has been imposed on him thus angering his town and family. Ernest is the most interesting character in that he shows how geniuses and men w ith unorthodox ideas are often called rebels and segregated from the rest of society in their uniqueness and intensity. Mary 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 mental instability shows the diplomacy of the human mind. Her character as that of Ernest is astoundingly realistic and thus one of the most effective characters in the novel. One of the most compelling 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 alert 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 very short periods of time as he only describes what is striking and alway s brings naked as a jaybird dimensions to old characters thus he shows what Mary was interchangeable 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 pillow slip of Dick) or became insane (in the case of Mary).