Protagonist

Character Role Analysis

Bone Boatwright

This is an easy one, right? Bone is 1) the narrator of a book, 2) the subject of the plot, and 3) the character doing most of the plot's action. If you scroll down, however, you might notice that one main character is missing: Anney.

Anney kind of shares the spotlight with Bone, but not so much that we would call her another protagonist (she's definitely not a main character in the way that Bone is). She's not the antagonist, because she's not against Bone in any way; she's not the mentor, because her role in the plot goes way beyond just giving Bone some good advice every now and then; and she's not a foil to Bone, because their lives aren't really comparable. So where does she fit in?

You might call Anney Bone's motivation, or her role model (role model is different from mentor here because she isn't guiding Bone so much as serving as an example). A lot of what Bone does serves to make Anney's life easier—keeping quiet about Glen's abuse, going to stay with one of her aunts when things are bad at home, and so on—and perhaps an even bigger motivation for Bone is that she wants Anney's love, which she is questioning more and more as the situation with Glen gets worse.

By the end of the novel, we see how Anney, in spite of everything that has happened, is still a model for a strong Boatwright woman. So in a weird way, even though Bone doesn't "achieve" Anney's love and protection (or if she does, she does it at the expense of losing Anney), she has still learned and grown by Anney's actions.