Character Clues
Character Analysis
Actions
Remember when Hallie tells Codi that "[w]hat keeps you going isn't some fine destination but just the road you're on, and the fact that you know how to drive" (18.225)? In this book that translates to this: it's what you do that defines who you are.
Consider the moment early on when Codi saves Emelina's baby Nicholas from choking on his refried beans. The whole sequence is about Codi's competence: she sees that there's something wrong with his little tiny baby body, and she knows all three of the methods for getting an improperly mashed bean out of an infant's windpipe. Still, when Emelina is freaking out because Codi just totally saved her kid's life, Codi's all, "It's no big deal," because "I'd just done what I knew how to do" (11.101-2).
The point is that doing what you know how to do every day is enough to create a life. The women of Stitch and B**** are another example: they don't know how to dynamite bulldozers, but they do know how to make some ridiculously fine folk art piñatas, and that's enough to save their town.
On the other hand, Doc is kind of an example of how this kind of characterization can go bad. He did what he does every day, too, and it's not like he's terrible—he was a good town doctor until he started yelling dementedly at sixteen-year-old pregnant girls. But as a father, doing what he knew how to do meant inadequacy. He never did enough to show his daughters that he loved them, and it's only in hindsight that Codi can put together the evidence to recognize that he did.
She forgives him, but his actions—choosing not to hug the girls as kids, keeping them separate from the rest of town, keeping it to himself that he knew Codi was pregnant—ultimately characterize the withdrawn, solitary and controlling person that Doc often is.
Location
Everyone in Animal Dreams, except for Hallie and Carlo, lives in Grace, Arizona, but the houses that individual characters keep tell us a lot about them. Emelina's house is a domestic paradise, with kids and goats (what, you don't have goats in your paradise?) wandering through honeysuckle vines and fruit trees.
On the other end of the spectrum, Codi's walls are blank, and Emelina says her rooms have always looked "like a room somebody'd just moved out of" (8.76). The blank walls of Codi's rooms correspond to her fears about her own identity—you know, that she doesn't really have one.
Other characters' houses are tools to describe them, too. Think of Doc's rooms, which Codi describes as having "no order at all. Though if I mentioned it he'd come up with some elaborate rationale before he'd admit to disorganization" (71). That sounds a lot like the way that Doc deals with his own memories.
In fact, houses are so important in Animal Dreams that they sometimes do narrative work on their own, resolving questions and issues raised throughout the book just by the way they're described. The best example of this is Carlo's house in Tucson, the one that Codi and Hallie have both just moved out of at the start of the novel.
Remember how Codi has told us that she's always been waiting for Carlo to give her direction, to tell her who she is and how to live her life, just with his magical eyebrows? Well, when Codi goes back to visit Carlo in Chapter 17, she makes a point of noticing the fact that he has changed absolutely nothing about the house.
Carlo had let all the plants finish dying, as expected, but beyond that he'd made no effort to make the place his own. He seemed to be living like a man in mourning, not wishing to disturb the traces of a deceased wife. Or wives.
"This is creepy, Carlo," I told him... "Why haven't you moved things around? It looks like Hallie and I just walked out yesterday."
He shrugged. "What's to move around?" (17.32)
Later in the chapter, Carlo will ask Codi to go to Colorado with him, which sounds a little bit, almost, like offering her a life. Yet in this exchange, Codi shows us loud and clear that there's no way Carlo can tell her how to live, not just because that's a lousy thing to ask of anyone, but also because he's been doing the exact same thing with her and Hallie. Without the Noline sisters, there's basically nothing to Carlo. He's maybe even more of a home ignorer than Codi.
Clothing/Physical Appearance
There's nothing incredibly profound about the way that clothing, haircuts, and other attributes of physical appearance are used in Animal Dreams, but they're still important on occasion. Take, for example, Codi's focus on her "Billy Idol haircut" when she gets into town early in the book.
For those of you who were not around for the halcyon days of "White Wedding" and "Dancing with Myself," picture short, choppy, bleached blond spikes. In the late 80s, back before every three-year-old had a Mohawk like Maddox Pitt-Jolie, this was very risqué. What Kingsolver is telling us is that Codi hates feeling like an outsider in Grace. Even though it's probably a cool haircut on everyone except Guy Fieri, it makes her feel self-conscious and different, and she hates feeling different.
Kingsolver uses appearance to help fill out her characters in a few other places as well. One is in the contrast between Carlo and Loyd. Loyd is all muscle and manliness, whereas Carlo, when Codi sees him again in Chapter 17, "looked paler and smaller than I remembered him. No visible muscles" (17.43). This description functions mostly to characterize Codi—who wants something different from the man in her life now—rather than Carlo or Loyd.
Last but not least is Codi's description of the Stitch and B**** ladies, who regularly mix such items as "shellacked white hair...crowned with a navy bow that coordinated with her Steelworkers T-shirt" (16.21). The point is that these ladies are both feminine (bow) and tough (union T-shirt). They're representatives of an older generation, with shellacked white hair, but they're also not giving up on the future.
Who knew a hair tie-T-shirt combo could say so much?
Occupation
What you do every day is a big deal. Especially in this book.
Part of Codi's central conflict is the fact that she studied medicine for years but doesn't actually want to be a doctor. She can't figure out what to do with her life, so she's been everything from a researcher at the Mayo clinic to a frozen foods aficionado at the supermarket.
Ultimately, Codi finds out that teaching is something she loves to do. Note that we do not say "something she's good at," because as Doc points out, Codi, "could be a doctor if [she] wanted to do that" (14.101). It's not only about having the skills, or even doing a job well. Instead, it's about finding a job that can support your idea of who you are—your character, your identity.
Likewise, Loyd is both a train engineer and a cockfighter when we first meet him, and we get in-depth descriptions of how he does both of those jobs very well. He doesn't give up cockfighting because he's better at being a train driver; he gives it up because he doesn't want to be the kind of person that cockfighting makes him, a person who gets pleasure out of watching creatures claw each other to death. That's just not Loyd.
Family Life
It tells us a lot about both Codi and Doc that she doesn't want to live up at his house. Instead of being the "wifely daughter" in the Peter-Pan collar who takes care of her ailing old man (8.26), she moves in with Emelina, because, as she puts it, "I could stand some mothering" (8.73).
One of the things this tells us is that Codi doesn't want much more of Doc's brand of fathering. It also tells us is that Codi is primarily concerned with herself. She feels a little bit bad about that—she calls the wifely daughter who moves in with her pop a "good daughter," even if she imagines her with terrible hair (8.26), but she's also not going to let that make her move in with Doc.
Emelina's excellent mothering skills; her home, inherited from family; and the orchards she shares with J.T. are all indications of how deeply enfolded within Grace her Emelina's is. Emelina is a homemaker not just because she feeds her family and cleans up after them, but also because her talent and occupation is in creating home. It's no coincidence that those skills are exactly what her best friend needs to learn.
Interestingly, Codi feels a little betrayed when she realizes that Loyd is also a homemaker in his own way. It's not his occupation, as it is Emelina's, but as Codi puts it, "everywhere he'd been, he'd been with family" (18.134), even as he's moved from one set of relatives to another as a result of his father's bad behavior and eventual death. It turns out that Loyd is just as good at being part of a family as Emelina is, and while that at first makes Codi feel lonely, in the end, it's just what she needs.
Thoughts and Opinions
There is a lot of characterization through conversation going on in Animal Dreams. Take Hallie, for example, who enters the narrative almost entirely through the letters that contain her thoughts and opinions on everything from how admirable shrimp salesmen can be to the evil that is American citizens' ignorance of violence perpetrated in their name.
We never get to meet Hallie in person—we hear a little about her from Doc and Codi—but we get our clearest sense of who she is from what she says she thinks about the world in her letters.
Most of the other characters in this book get a chance to voice their opinions to Codi at some point. Loyd plainly tells her how he feels about her and has in-depth philosophical discussions with her about the meaning of things like home and family and grief. Emelina tells Codi what she thinks about Codi's living habits and her relationship with Loyd. Even Emelina's silences are eloquent, as when she refuses to say goodbye to Codi because she's so angry that Codi's leaving at all.
Even Doc, whose personality is so isolated and repressed that we have to inhabit his head just to understand that he loves his daughters, gets the chance to speak his mind three times in the novel.
Minor characters reveal themselves through their opinions, too. Remember Trish Garcia, the stereotypical grown-up cheerleader who meets Codi at the Labor Day barbeque? We only have to meet her once and hear her say about Hallie that "we can't all be the hero" to know she's not going to be best buds with Codi anytime soon (7.50).