Character Analysis
Stock is one of Florian's children, and Theo meets him for the first time in a tavern in Freyborg. He's a big fella with prematurely thinning hair, but he's also kind of the total package, brawn and brains crammed into the same body. Check out how Florian describes the young man:
"Our worthy Stock, though he may look like a prize bull, is by inclination a poet; by temperament, a dreamer." (12.23)
Yup—this guy is kind of the total package. Stock is a true intellectual, and loves the sound of his own voice, especially when he's talking about literature—when Theo first meets him, he gazes longingly at Stock's soup, which Stock is ignoring in favor of chatting. And when Theo sees Stock again, we get a sense of just how much of an idea man Stock is:
He let himself in, though uneasy at intruding on what sounded like a furious oration.
It was Stock and, as Theo would learn, only his way of holding forth on any subject. The burly poet stalked back and forth, arms waving. Florian, Justin, and several others unknown to Theo sat around a plank table.
"A battle, I say, is a poem," Stock was declaiming. "A sonnet of death, men for verses, blood for punctuation. Attack and counterattack, rhyme against rhyme, cavalry against foot—" (13.1-3)
Stock prefers to wax lyrical about lots of things, as opposed to helping in the day-to-day of Florian's rebellion. In fact, he'd rather not be a public letter writer, since he thinks he's too smart for this gig, and he's the one who brainstorms the name for the printing press (but Theo is the one who does the printing itself). But everyone needs creative folks, right?