This week I chose to read the short story “Julie” written by Darcy Padilla. Padilla served as the narrator and the story chronicled the life of Julie, a woman with a drug addiction and a victim of child and domestic abuse. The chapters of the short story follow her ex or current partners and the children she had with them.
Before creating a network graph, I created an edge graph seen above. I decided that the “edge” between the characters would be relation by blood. There are many family members that this story follows, and I wanted to be able to visualize which characters were blood related to one another. On the right side of the network graph, there are two characters (the narrator and Paul) who do not happen to be blood related to anyone, but play a role in the story and Julie’s life. The narrator was Julie’s “rock” throughout her life, always there for here. Even though the narrator was not related to Julie by blood, she was very important and should be included in the graph.
This network graph shows that Julie is the main character and shares a blood relationship to most other characters in the story (because many of the other characters her children). The graph also illuminates who the father of her children are. It shows that she has shared many children with Jason, and one with Jack. Most of Julie’s children were taken away at birth by the government, so Jason Jr is the biological son of Julie and Jason, but also shares a connection to Karen because she is the adoptive mother who renamed him Zach. Julie’s life was very complicated and this graph shows the many people who came in and out of her life.
What this network graph fails to show is the exact relationship between the characters. The “edge” between the characters is blood relation, but the graph would be much more interactive and insightful there was a way to specify what type of relation like mother, father, uncle, etc. This graph also fails to show if the character played a positive or negative impact on Julie’s life. The narrative was all about Julie’s life and her relationships. A way to improve this graph would possibly be to give weight to some characters who made a more positive impact on Julie’s life, but that data would be extremely subjective.