Character Clues

Character Analysis

Dialogue

When it comes to figuring out what a character is all about, sometimes what he or she says turns out to be way less important than how he or she says it.

Take a look at this exchange between Roxy and Tom, for instance. In an effort to get some money out of Tom, Roxy tries her best to butter him up:

"Look at me good; does you 'member old Roxy?—does you know yo' old n***** mammy, honey? Well, now, I kin lay down en die in peace, 'ca'se I's seed--" (8.39)

Oh, but Tom's not having any of it. He interrupts her, demanding:

"Cut it short,--it, cut it short! What is it you want?" (8.39-40)

Roxy's way of laying on the sugary sweetness in order to get what she wants shows that she's pretty skilled at the fine art of manipulation. While her ability to manipulate others isn't perhaps the noblest of qualities, it does help to highlight that Roxy is one clever character. Notably, Roxy's smarts help to defy nineteenth-century assumptions about blacks' intellectual inferiority to whites (as we discuss in more depth in the Character Analysis of Chambers—check it out!).

As for our friend Tom (we're using the word friend loosely), his dialogue allows us yet another opportunity to see his jerkiness in action. Up until this point, we've been told that he's a spoiled, lazy brat and we've seen him beating up poor Chambers. His harsh tone and ultra-curt manner of speaking to his mother is like the icing on the cake; there's no doubt in our minds now that Tom is one mean dude.

Direct Characterization

Sometimes our narrator makes it super easy for us to get a sense of the characters in this novel, flat-out telling us all about them. Consider the narrator's description of Tom and Chambers, for example. It just doesn't get much more straightforward than this:

Tom was a sickly child and Chambers wasn't. Tom was 'fractious,' as Roxy called it, and overbearing; Chambers was meek and docile. (4.5)

Not to be critical of a literary god like Mark Twain or anything, but direct characterization typically isn't the most compelling technique for portraying characters. Why should we take the narrator's word for it that these characters are the way the narrator says they are? Does Twain think we're chumps who'll believe anything this all-mighty narrator tells us?

Luckily, our narrator backs up such statements with plenty of concrete examples. We get to see the fractious Tom railing on Chambers again and again. We also get to see the meek and docile Chambers patiently enduring Tom's abuse. So in this case, the narrator's direct statements about these two serve to whet our appetites for what's to come.

Social Status

We only need to spend a little bit of time in Dawson's Landing to figure out that this place is pretty similar to high school. That is, there's a clear hierarchy in which some characters have crazy amount of power and others just don't.

Someone like Percy Driscoll, for instance, sits firmly at the top of the pecking order due to his family's social status. The narrator explains:

In Missouri a recognized superiority attached to any person who hailed from Old Virginia; and this superiority was exalted to supremacy when a person of such nativity could also prove descent from the First Families of that great commonwealth. The Howards and Driscolls were of this aristocracy. In their eyes it was nobility. (12.1)

Wow, that really helps to explain why Percy Driscoll seems to think that he's such a big deal. As we see in the scene in which he threatens to sell all his slaves down the river, this guy just loves to lord his power over others.

In sharp contrast, Roxy's slave status makes her pretty powerless, despite outward appearances to the contrary:

To all intents and purposes Roxy was as white as anybody, but the one-sixteenth of her which was black out-voted the other fifteen parts and made her a negro. She was a slave, and salable as such. (2.14)

Not only does Roxy have to endure all of the junk that comes with being a slave like poor living conditions and a lack of freedom, her status as "salable" suggests that she's utterly powerless over her fate. At any time, we learn, she can be sold and banished to even worse conditions. Appreciating this aspect of her character is crucial to understanding her drastic decision to switch the places of Tom and Chambers.

Man, the powerful have so much influence over the lives of the powerless in this book that it kind of makes your head spin.