For this blog post, I chose to analyze networks and relationships between characters in the Anne Carson play Krapp Hour Act I. Already familiar with the poetry of contemp lit heroine Anne Carson, I thought it would be a ton of fun to work with a literary piece that utilizes absurdity and disorientation to formulate bonds between characters. The play revolves around the talk show “Krapp Hour” — hosted by a figure named Krapp and featuring a slew of celebrity guests. The high profile guest list includes figures like Jack Kerouac and his mother Gabrielle (referred to as ‘Gabe’), who speak about the beat generation, ‘the banana man’, shallow journalism, and a prospective trip to RadioCity later in the day. Characters enter and exit, filtering in and out of scenes with Krapp being the central node tying the network together. Other players enter the scene, such as Martin Heidegger or Henry David Thoreau’s Aunt, Maria. Characters ramble on and on. When not babbling incoherently, readers are offered anecdotes and short stories. For example — the story of the gardener, retold by Aunt Maria, featuring Death and the Princess of Cincinnati. Overall, it was a lot of fun working with such a nonsensical network. I will note that the talk show format easily illuminated most of the relationships between characters. The general format of the work (i.e, the piece being a play) made it easy to comprehend interpersonal interactions and connections between individual figures.
My resulting network graph was:
It’s great that the format and style that the piece was written in allowed for you to easily piece together the interactions that each of the characters had with one another. What else does your graph say about the narrative or character interactions? I see that the people with the most interactions were: Jack Kerouac, Krapp, Thoreau’s Aunt Maria, The Gardener and the Princess. I’m assuming these are the main characters that stayed in the scene. I loved to hear that you were familiar with the author’s work and were genuinely interested in the story! Thanks for sharing.
it’s great to see some of the absurdity of logically charting a graph of something that is illogical, or doesn’t follow the sort of rules that we’re generally looking at