Character Clues

Character Analysis

Social Status

This is a book that criticizes materialism and social structures that are based on it, so it's no surprise that social status totally matters here. Joe comes from a family whose wealth is not measured in money but in their self-sufficiency. There's a delicious description in Chapter 9 of all the awesome food Joe's dad grows, and yet the family's one symbol of capital (the expensive fishing rod) is still so small that it determines their status and keeps them as "little guys."

There aren't many "big guys" actually in the novel, but we're supposed to get a sense of how the little guys live and what they are asked to sacrifice for these dudes, and for what gain.

Location/Nationality

Location tells us about a character through generalizations. Characters can be tied to regions, like Colorado or Los Angeles, or to nations, like France or Germany or England or the United States. Especially in a novel about nations at war interacting with each other, nationality becomes a particularly important way people define each other.

Joe, for instance, doesn't like the idea that people may think he's English, even though the English and the Americans are fighting on the same side. He goes through a whole spiel about how English "Limeys" are "more like foreigners than the Frenchmen" (12.17), so clearly nationality is a major factor in how Joe perceives and categorizes people. Where does this kind of thinking actually get him?

Names/Titles/Occupations

Head over to Joe's "Character Analysis" to see why his name is important (hint: he's an average guy), but his is just the tip of the name iceberg. While a name like Bill Harper doesn't tell us much about the character except that he, too, is a boy-next-door type, other names do—particularly the names Joe gives to people while he's lying on his hospital bed.

Lazarus, for instance, isn't the real name of that dead German soldier, but it foreshadows the strange ways that the war blurs the lines between life and death. Or take Lucky, the prostitute in Paris the soldiers go to see before being sent back to the front—where, if they're lucky, they'll survive in one piece.

Then there are the people who have no names, but whom Joe identifies by occupation: the strict, by-the-book colonel; the compassionate and maternal day nurse; the cold and authoritarian doctor. These names tell us something about the characters by appealing to our sense of type. We know that kind of colonel and that kind of nurse because we've all seen them in movies, read about them in books, and met them in real life.