Character Analysis
Resi is kind of terrifying. Not quite kill-you-and-wear-your-skin terrifying, but close. After her big sister, Helga, goes missing, Resi assumes her big sis's identity and goes right into the arms—and bed—of Campbell.
Yeah, you read that right.
We throw mad shade on Campbell for, you know, not recognizing that this is not his wife even after the fifteen-year gap, but we're also super weirded out by Resi's choices.
She's a conflicted woman. She goes to all this trouble to be Helga, but she wants Campbell to write about her and to put into print '[t]he quintessence of Resi…Resi Noth' (24.59). By the end of the novel, we kind of get a clearer picture of her thinking.
Struggling with nihilism even as a child, Resi just needs a reason to keep going, and her grasping for life is pretty humbling:
'Then tell me what to live for—anything at all,' she said beseechingly. 'It doesn't have to be love. Anything at all.' She gestured at objects around the shabby room, dramatizing exquisitely my own sense of the world's being a junk shop. 'I'll live for that chair, that picture, that furnace pipe, that couch, that crack in the wall! Tell me to live for it, and I will' she cried. (38.27)
Leave it to Campbell to turn this moment into one of his trite observations. There's a human in front of him begging to learn how to live, but he sort of just pats himself on the back when her urgent questioning mirrors his casual musings. One thing we learn by the conclusion of this scene is that Resi is a woman of (misguided) action: she ends her life when she thinks there are no good reasons to keep going.
Oh, she's also a Soviet spy. NBD. It's okay, because she loves Campbell.