Character Analysis
Seventeen years old and the star of his high school football team, Whit seems like an all-American kind of guy. Even The One Who Is The One makes him sound like something out of an Abercrombie and Fitch ad: "Tall and blond, slender yet well-muscled, perfectly proportioned" (8.24). Well then.
But beneath this smooth exterior lies some serious emotional pain: Whit's girlfriend, Celia, has been missing for three months. "Even before the drinking started, Whit couldn't walk through our house without knocking something over" (2.5), Wisty tells us. So he has clearly been depressed for a while—and his problems are about to get worse.
Big Brother
At around 2:00AM, Whit gets a rude awakening: Government soldiers are at his house to arrest him and his sister. They charge Whit with being a wizard and he's completely flummoxed—and mad. "This is utterly crazy! There's no such thing as witches or wizards!" he says to the soldiers. "Fairy tales are a load of crap" (6.6). Like Wisty, then, Whit has no idea about his magical powers, or that magic even exists in the world.
In prison with Wisty, Whit begins to accept the fact that he and his sister are magical. Though her powers seem to be developing at a more rapid rate than his own, Whit is always super protective of his little sister. Whit says of the Visitor:
"When that bullying, cowardly freak smacked Wisty's hand with his snake whip, I almost lunged for him. I was ready to fight to the death, whatever it took. Nobody hits my sister." (26.1)
Eventually, he learns to let go of that protective impulse, reluctantly allowing Wisty to take the lead in the rebels' prison raid. So while part of how Wisty changes in this book is by stepping into her powers, part of how Whit changes is by learning to step out of her way.
Undying Love
Being hauled off to prison has its perks. There, Whit is reunited with his girlfriend, Celia, who's been missing for the last three months. The only downside? She's totally dead—as in murdered and now visiting him occasionally in ghost form. (Is that a relationship? Or is it just a haunting?) Whit's excitement to see Celia is undercut by the intense grief he feels every time she has to leave. "I loved Celia like crazy," he tells us. "To have her ripped out of my life, over and over again, was unbearable" (63.1). Aw, poor guy.
Stuck in a cycle of grief when it comes to Celia, Whit's growth over the course of the book is relatively stagnant. His powers develop some, and he's plenty heroic, but he's routinely outshined by Wisty, who seems to be growing more powerful by the minute. Perhaps because of this—and because the book is more action-driven than character-driven—we don't get a full sense of who Whit is as a person.
Whit's Timeline