Word: protagonist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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After the dour, crabbed atmosphere of the Carter years, the country needed a mood change. The great failure, and great paradox, of the Reagan era is that its protagonist succeeded too well on that score. His rhetoric on domestic matters encouraged Americans to celebrate instant gratification at the expense of the future, while his policies channeled national energies away from enterprises of common purpose. Reaganomics increased the national debt by 170% and converted the U.S. from a major creditor to a vulnerable debtor in the global financial market...
There are no moral complexities here, no cunning passages of history, no double agents trading allegiances for meaning. But there is a tumultuous plot, an appealing young protagonist -- who except Hitler could root against a pre- pubescent? -- and a prime villain. Colonel Gregor Laemmle, the SS officer in pursuit of Thomas, is far more than the usual posturing sadist. A former philosophy professor, he is a connoisseur of art and literature and something of a chess master himself. Laemmle regards the hunting of Thomas as a large- scale tournament, with gambits to be savored even when they go against...
...dwell in the surreal land we all inhabit, as we float vagrantly from suffocating reality to liberating fantasy, from pessimism to possibility, from fear to hope -- and then back, always back again, when we realize that the conditional tense holds even more horror than the present. Ultimately a Potter protagonist is likely to realize, like Dorothy back from Oz, that life is best endured at home. Just plant a bitter smile on your face, and whistle something sweet in the dark...
Ownership becomes one of the most important concepts in the novel as it traces the course of the letter's dissemination. The letter becomes truly a letter left "to me," instead of "for me," as control over it passes from the protagonist's hands. When the book opens, the boy's mother has just handed the boy the letter, and immediately he is caught up in its contents and its history...
...changes his way of adapting to death, McElroy shifts the tone of the novel. The first chapters are a monologue, mirroring the isolation and entrapment that the protagonist feels. Later, McElroy inserts dialogue into the text, a change that reflects the boy's attempts to adjust to his father's death and to the dissemination of the letter...