Protagonist

Character Role Analysis

Codi Noline

Cosima "Codi" Noline is the protagonist of Animal Dreams. What happens in this book happens primarily to her, and she's the one whose transformation this novel describes.

Even though there's no question that Animal Dreams is Codi's story, however, it's an interesting choice on Kingsolver's part to make the book about her. After all, Hallie is the one who goes off to fight for community and justice in a war zone. Codi even says, "Hallie was a protagonist of history" (27.34). Hallie's the one with the bad guys to fight, so why is the sister who didn't go to war the one who gets a novel written about her?

That's an interesting question, and it's one that critics of this book have been considering since its publication. Take this review of this review of Animal Dreams by the American novelist Jane Smiley, written for the New York Times in 1990. Smiley notes that "[a] novelist of the 1930s might have organized this book around the fight to save the town. A novelist of the 1940s would have made Hallie's struggle and her fate the central story." So if the choice to make Hallie the protagonist, or Black Mountain the antagonist, would have said something about the preoccupations of the '30s and '40s, what does Kingsolver's choice of protagonist say about the late '80s and early '90s?

Smiley thinks it says that one of the struggles of those decades was to understand the role of the individual in a global political network where the effects of people's actions—and inactions—go way beyond their own backyard. That rings true to us. Sure, Codi spends a lot of time whining about how ineffective and lame she feels when her own sister is involved in an armed struggle in a foreign country, but ultimately, she understands that the best she can do is keep trying every day. Sometimes that's nowhere near enough, but sometimes it saves a town.