Chapter 4 Character
4.2. Characterization
4.2.1. By Appearance
In the real world, as people meet a stranger, their first impression is what s/he looks like, including her/his face, figure, clothing and so on. This is similar to how an author tries to introduce the characters to the readers, particularly for the first time.
Lodge takes George Eliot’s Middlemarch as an example, illustrating how older fiction introduces a character by giving a physical description:
Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters; and her profiles as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments….(68)
However, in modern novels, such long descriptions of a character’s appearance become fewer and fewer. Nowadays the readers are not as patient as before, so some writers skip the static description in order to give the story a faster pace. Especially due to the readership and the length of the story, many writers for young adult novels omit any description of appearance at all, but write down more actions and dialogues instead. With respect to Cormier’s books, it is found that in his first novel for young adults, The Chocolate War, there are still a lot of descriptions of characters’ appearance, particularly of the main characters—usually the round characters. For instance, Cormier describes Archie as “Archie’s voice was soft with concern, his eyes gentle with compassion” (10) to contrast with his real manipulative personality. And Emile is “a brute which was kind of funny because he didn’t look like a brute. He wasn’t big or overly strong. In fact, he was small for a tackle on the football team. But he was an animal and he didn’t play by the rules” (49). Such description gives the readers an image of this character, and implies what he is going to do in the future.
Although there are plenty of descriptions of characters’ appearance in The Chocolate War, readers find much less description in Cormier’s second young adult novel I Am the Cheese. In this novel Cormier uses more narrative devices than static statements. There are three narrative layers in I Am the Cheese: a first-person narrator
“I” who begins a bicycle journey, the tape transcriptions of a psychotherapist using an objective point of view, and the narration following a tape transcription with a third-person narrator named Adam. Not surprisingly, “I” as a teen narrator in this case does not describe other people because “I” has been preoccupied with finding his father. In addition, a teenager “I” may not have much patience for or pay much attention to other people. In the second layer, the objective transcriptions, it is reasonable to have dialogues (or so-called “interrogations”) between the psychotherapist Brint and the patient without any description or only a little. However, as Brint asks about “the gray man”, the patient replies that “there was something—gray about him. His hair was gray. But more than that: to me, gray is nothing color and that’s how Mr. Grey seemed to me. Like nothing” (109). The description of this mysterious person indicates the importance of “the gray man”, who is beyond “nothing” and even related to everything of the patient’s past. Here is a powerful irony.
On the contrary, only in the third-person narrator Adam’s section, the readers can find some descriptions of others, especially of a girl Amy whom Adam is fond of.
Adam describes Amy as “she was short and robust and freckled, and one of her front teeth was crooked, but her eyes were beautiful, blue, like the blue of his mother’s best china” (46). This description also has the significance: for Adam, Amy’s existence is not only as a girl, but as the light of his life. And it is the same to the readers for the readers; as the readers read the passages about Amy, they rest themselves a little bit during the reading.
Descriptions of people’s appearance are less used by modern authors of young adult novels. When a writer describes a character deliberately, it is assumed that this character must be extraordinary or abnormal, or at least special, in terms of characterization. Brooks and Penn Warren argue that “every character in fiction must
resemble ourselves; that is, he or she must be recognizable human even as we are. But some characters are obviously much more special than others, and require much fuller characterization” (107). To Take Cormier’s Tenderness as an example, the readers read of the protagonist, a vicious serial murderer Eric, “he had an innocent face. His face was also beautiful. Innocence and beauty, always confirmed when he looked into a mirror, which he often did” (30). This description of Eric’s appearance contrasts with the appearance of the police lieutenant Jake, who tries his best to put Eric into prison: “he was an old man, crevices in his face, sorrowful blue eyes, wispy gray hair.
He smoked endless cigarettes, the ashes falling indiscriminately on his shirt or tie. His jacket never matched his trousers” (36). They are very different in both appearance and personality. However, the good-looking one is a real criminal whereas the sloppy one is a law-defender. This is an ironic effect in this novel just as in I Am the Cheese.
So Cormier gives the readers examples of “do not judge a book by its cover”.
Characterization by appearance usually has its specific purpose. In Cormier’s 1995 psychological thriller In the Middle of the Night, the protagonist Denny has a connection with a female Lulu by phone, and he is attracted by Lulu’s smoky but sexy voice. Denny later falls in love with Lulu, or more precisely, with her voice, with
“someone he had never seen, did not know at all, someone who might be a girl or a woman. Loved someone who was completely unknown to him, like some one in a dream” (149). Denny’s dream continued until he meets Lulu in her house, and “he saw a woman entering the room, leaning on an aluminium walker as she made her way painfully toward him, one deliberate step at a time” (169). Denny hears Lulu’s greeting; he recognizes this voice, but denies the voice belonging to Lulu:
That voice. Lulu’s voice. But this could not be Lulu, this woman with legs in steel braces, old, not old like a grandmother, but not young, skin
tight on her cheeks, gaunt, disheveled black hair tumbling over her forehead in untidy bangs.
“Sorry to disappoint you, Denny,” she said, the voice still husky but tinged with sarcasm now. (169)
Such appearance not only disappoints Denny, but also astonishes him. Cormier gives a more detailed description of Lulu’s looks in order to express Denny’s shock and Lulu’s deep resentment against Denny’s father because Lulu thought that Denny’s father caused a theater fire, destroying her appearance and her identity. For many people, how they look is very relevant to what they are; that is to say, the appearance is related to the identity. In Heroes, the very first paragraph describes the protagonist Francis: “My name is Francis Joseph Cassavant and I have just returned to Frenchtown in Monument and the war is over and I have no face” (1). Afterwards, a specific description of Francis’s “no face” is given:
I keep a bandage on the space where my nose used to be. The bandage reaches the back of my head and is kept in place with a safety pin.
There are problems, of course.
My nose, or I should say my caves, run a lot. I don’t know why this should happen and even the doctors can’t figure it out but it’s like I have a cold that never goes away. The bandage gets wet and I have to change it often and it’s hard closing the safety pin at the back of my head. (3)
The opening soon catches the readers’ attention, and gives them an image of the protagonist Francis. In terms of Francis’s “no face”, Campbell argues that “he
[Cormier] has created a character in whom an inherent compulsion to hide is made visible in his facelessness and his concealing bandages”. Campbell also quotes an interview with Cormier: “he [Francis] is in disguise for two reasons: because he is going to commit this act of revenge and doesn’t want people to know who he is. But he is also hiding from his real identity, too, and from something that he did in his past” (Campbell 1:189). This case of “no face” indicates that the appearance, particularly the face, seems to be a symbol of the identity. Another example is Ozzie in Fade, who had been abused in his childhood; his nose had been broken and was always running. Ozzie hates everything, including his surroundings and himself: “he hated the convent itself. Hated the rest of the world too. Hated himself as well, especially the parts of himself he could do nothing about, the headaches and the sniveling. Never could get rid of it, the running nose” (227). Ozzie’s injured nose symbolizes his damaged personality, and later he commits several crimes including a homicide. However, after he dies on his uncle Paul, Ozzie’s nose has a different image: “something almost sweet in the face, in repose, as if untouched by time or pain or injury, the abused nose not repulsive now, still bruised and broken but noble somehow, like an old battle wound” (298). Ozzie’s nose is a symbol in this novel too, just like Francis’s “no face” in Heroes. These two examples show that the characterization by the appearance not only gives the character a vivid image, but also has a symbolic meaning.