For today’s blog post, I chose to make a character chart for the short story, “Exotics“. The narrative follows the main character, James, who works as a teacher in a single-room school house, and spends his summer working on a ranch in Fort Worth, Texas. The story takes place just after one of James’ students commits suicide in the school’s bathroom.
The character chart that I created links James to every character he interacts with within the story. Each link signifies a direct conversation that occurred between each character. Absence of links signifies that the characters are not related within the story. As seen through the graph, while many characters share connections, the common thread between all characters in the story is, unsurprisingly, James. Unfortunately, much is left out from this graph, such as the nature of the connections, the themes and symbols that appeared throughout the story, or even who the characters are. In fact, it’s a bit frustrating how little the chart elucidates, and is arguably more distracting than it is telling. For this reason, it might not be appropriate to graph connections between characters, but perhaps maybe appropriate to connect symbols with the themes that they represent, as the character connections play a small role in the larger scheme of the story.
So I also did this story my blog post, and I was considering organizing it the way you did but instead organized it by how the relationship was associated for James. I really through the story was an interesting twist of love and misery. Its disappointing how much information is left out from the diagram, but I think thats what makes this story so great, the adultery and mysteriousness of what is happening is what kept me intrigued throughout the entire tale.
I really liked how you structured this post by showing what your initial thought process was like when you were first creating the diagram and then showcasing what your thoughts were after you had made it. I definitely agree after examining the diagram that it does feel like its lacking in far too many qualities and insights to really be useful as it has been defined for this edge case.
I think that your suggestion about graphing symbols and themes instead of characters is a really good idea! I agree, and if I had the opportunity to include major symbols in my network graph, I think it would have given a better representation of the story and a better idea about the narrative. It is important to remember that just the characters are sometimes not the focus of a narrative, and trying to incorporate what the story actually focuses on might create better, more accurate data visualizations.
Risha