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For this week’s blog post, I read the short story, “Some Other Katherine,” by Sam Byers. The story is told in third person about a British thirty-year-old woman named Katherine who maintains casual relationships with men and expects very little in return. Her main male companion is Keith, who has outside relationships, but only ever mentions Janice, a blond he went to Tenerife with, leading to Katherine’s jealousy. The network graph, in not allowing color, is frustrating in this case. Though Keith is a prominent character throughout the story, we can’t denote that because he has merely two connections, one to Katherine and one to Janice. It puts him on par with the stripper, Clover, whom Katherine interacted with once, or Brian, whom Katherine only slept with for a short time and is hardly mentioned in comparison to Keith.
Debbie, Carol, Dawn, and Jules are all coworkers of Katherine’s, as are Keith, Brian, and Mike. While the ladies are all connected as a work friendship, Katherine has slept with all of the men, but Mike had a problem with her relationship with Brian and was unaware of her relations with Keith, hence no relationship between them. Because many of them were not directly stated as being aware of each other or having relations, I did not mark a connection.
It was really interesting how you said that even though Keith was mentioned heavily, it is not accurately portrayed in the network map because he only has two connections. I feel if I were to look at the network graph by itself, I would quickly know that Katherine would be the main character, but I would assume, with all the connections with the coworkers, that the story was somehow more about them and not about Katherine and her relationships with the men.
I really enjoyed reading your analysis. You did a great job of attributing an important aspect of the short story to the chart. In my analysis, I connected the character relations and I was frustrated by the lack of information that the chart provided. Now after reading your post, I wish I had expanded my chart to include more important features of the story that I examined.