I decided to read and analyze the short story, “Self-Made Man” by Mark Gevisser. It essentially speaks about the life of an 18 year old named Liam Kai who was born a female in China and adopted at six months. He was originally named Lucy by his American mothers. Although he was living as a tomboy all of his life, at age thirteen he began to live as a boy. The article goes on to talk about the different approaches and views his lesbian parents had about his gender identification. One parent (Beth) was accepting while the other insisted he wear dresses because it would make him healthier and happier to accept himself as a female. At age eighteen, when he can finally have surgery legally, he decided to transition his body from a female to a male with surgeries and hormones.
I created a list of characters from the story and put them in categories from 1-5. The higher the number, the more influence the character had on Liam’s life. This graph basically shows the similarities between the characters with equal amount of influence on Liam.
It shows that the most influence in Liam’s life was that of his mother Beth along with Andrea and Carol.
Your summary of the storyline really compels me to read it, but the graph doesn’t seem to cover all of the crucial relationships with characters in Liam’s life. Separating the map into 5 different levels gives a visual representation of where Liam stands with certain relationships, but making him central in the map and arranging those who affected him via lines (and adjusting weight of each line) would be another way to display/look at the characters.
Some other factors that the map doesn’t illuminate may also include what the categories indicate – the higher the number means there was more influence but it doesn’t indicate how these people affected Liam (when, how, to what degree, positive or negative, etc.).
Even though the main plots of the story are compelling and sensational the presented “network” seems to need more reconstruction. It is novel to visualize relationships of the protagonist and others by intensity but the graph does not really show a net rather than five isolated connections. If the protagonist is the core figure of the fiction perhaps every other character take actions on him and the whole network can all be built with the knots surrounding him.
I really like what you did here with “influence” in terms of each character’s relevance to the main character’s life. Interesting read!