Foil

Character Role Analysis

Codi and Doc; Codi and Hallie; Carlo and Loyd

There are lots of foils in Animal Dreams. Carlo's wimpy physique and lack of self-knowledge make it clear just how smart, attentive, and smokin' hot Loyd Peregrina is. Hallie is set up as Codi's other half in the first scene, where Doc looks at his daughters asleep so close together that, "[n]o light could show where one body ends and the other begins" (1.2). Certainly Codi thinks of Hallie as her foil—the one that all of her boyfriends were secretly in love with, the one who always tried to save small animals from harm—but the narrative reveals that this isn't accurate. In particular, Codi taught Hallie to stand up for the weak, so it turns out that they're not so much foils as twins.

The real foil for Codi is Doc. At the beginning, these seem almost to be the same person: they're both doctors, and they're both really, really bad at remembering their own pasts. But over the course of the novel, while Doc's memory fades further, Codi learns who she is.