Word: protagonists
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...half-outraged, half-defensive statement by self-described "gun fanatic" Charles A. Whitman, father of Mass Murderer Charles J. Whitman, that "I raised my boys to know how to handle guns" echoes the plaintive wail of another father, Willy Loman, protagonist of Death of a Salesman, who in exasperation over his son Biff, cries out: "Why is he stealing? What did I tell him? I never in my life told him anything but decent things." Particularly in light of the Austin tragedy, Whitman's utterance seems just as hollow, counterfeit and pathetic as Willy...
...Whitman's sanguinary spree had an unsettling number of precedents, both in fiction and in fact. The imaginary parallels are grisly?and suggestive?enough: from The Sniper, a 1952 movie about a youth who shoots blondes, to The Open Square, a 1962 novel by Ford Clarke, whose protagonist climbs a tower on a Midwestern campus and begins picking people off. (So far as police know, Whitman had neither seen the movie nor read the book.) Even the fiction, however, pales before the fact. There was Scripture-reading Howard Unruh's 20-minute orgy that brought death to 13 people...
...first feature film, is a droll defense of an aimless Czech teenager, who drifts from senseless jobs to hopeless dance-hall encounters to empty lectures at home. In the devastating symbolism of Joseph Kilián, by 30-year-old Director Pavel Juráček, the protagonist borrows a cat from a pet shop and is entangled in a bleak, Kafkaesque nightmare while trying to return it. Painting a surprisingly harsh portrait of Communism's common man, Evald Schorm, 34, debunks bureaucracy with unmuffled freedom in his Courage for Every Day. Chosen by a magazine as the exemplar...
What Welch's protagonist comes to, first of all, is the noisy antiseptic indignity of life in a hospital ward. Patients are frenzied or conniving; doctors hearty and indifferent. Drifting in and out of fantasies, he plods a painful path from demi-death to limited life. Welch's perceptions are keen, and his imagery probes reality like a scalpel. A nurse's face "gained an unreal nutcracker severity from the curve and compression of her nose and lips. It was as if a heavy weight on her head had crumpled the features underneath." Railroad tracks, "like never...
...Bains was an episode, scarcely enough to sustain a novel. Habe's book is upholstered with plot digressions, epigrams ("the everlasting exchange of deceptions which we call social life"), philosophizing and methodical character analyses beneath which the characters themselves threaten to disappear. The figure of Habe's protagonist, Heinrich von Benda, is so overburdened with the mantle of tragedy that his death, of a heart attack in the train bearing him back to occupied Vienna, comes as a kind of comic relief...