Antagonist

Character Role Analysis

Indian Woman's Husband

He seems like an inconsequential side character at first, or even just a part of the scenery, until his self-inflicted action changes everything. He is not the antagonist in the traditional sense—meaning he doesn't set out to thwart our main character's plans—but instead he is an inadvertent antagonist when he transforms what was supposed to be an educational field trip into a somber experience filled with death and questions about weakness (see our discussion of suffering in the "Themes" section for more on this).