In Callan Wink’s Exotics, the reader is introduced to the protagonist, James Colson, who is a school teacher at Pine Creek School. The short story begins with James ending the school year and beginning his summer vacation. We learn that James is extremely unhappy being a teacher and is quite impulsive when he decides to leave for the summer to get away. Because James is traveling throughout this short story, I decided to group the character’s relationships by setting.
In the story, we see that James lives in Montana where his strongest relationship is with his lover, Carina. There is a mentioning of two other students: Molly Hatchet and Ellen Realbird as well as a Montana State Guest Speaker. Then James travels to Colorado to visit his brother, Casey and Casey’s wife, Linda. Then eventually we see James travel to work in a ranch in Austin with a man named Karl.
Even though the Network Analysis helped to group these characters and give some meaning behind the basis of James’ and their relationships, I feel that GoogleFusions did not fully encapsulate what I wanted. I wanted to represent how important they were to James, but I struggled with finding a way to depict that. Even though Carina is the character who he has the strongest bond with, she is only seen in the first part of the short story then remembered throughout. I wasn’t sure how to accurately group these characters to fully depict their relationships to James.
Also, half of the characters mentioned in the short story played very slim roles in the plot and had such a loose relationship with James that it was hard to decide whether they were important enough to be in the chart. However, without them only four characters would have been in the GoogleFusion tables, so all were included.
