This week, I read Summer by Molly Antopol, an interesting short story about the narrator’s grandfather who shows signs of post-traumatic stress disorder. Through the story, it is evident that this mental health condition is the source of conflict between the father and grandfather.
Although there are very few characters in the story, I chose to make a network graph with edges between characters who spoke to each other. The arrows show the direction with the other characters in the story. You can check out the interactive graph here!
This network graph helps illuminate several interesting things. Surprisingly, the father, as opposed to the narrator, is the central character of the story connecting all the other characters. Although the father and mother in this graph is the narrator’s parents, the narrator does not share a node with her mother because the story is more about the father and grandfather’s relationship.
The interactions you see are limited because it is from the perspective of the narrator. Where she is, limits who you can “see” speaks to who. While this graph allows one to make basic inferences about the story and the interactions between characters, many important aspects of the story are not represented by the graph. For example, since this graph is not weighted, it treats every interaction between characters to have occurred only in one scene. However, the reality is that several characters interacted multiple times throughout the story. This graph is limited in that it does not express the strength of relationship between characters.