In “Quarter Past Midnight” by Marie-Helene Bertino, Ben Allen takes Sarina Greene as his prom date to their high school prom, but the night ends differently than they both wished for. Ben wants to look cool in front of his date, so, under the wrong advice, he limits compliments and interactions with Sarina throughout the night. He leaves her alone and hangs out with another girl. And this only leads to heartbreak and misunderstanding between Ben and Sarina. Sarina, whose father left her family not too long ago, thought prom would be the only thing that can make her life more bearable. However, her date not only neglects her but she witnesses him kissing another girl. Ben doesn’t notice Sarina’s disappointment until he sees her dancing with another classmate.
The characters are connected through their interactions with each other. I chose to include both spoken interactions and implicit interactions since some characters appear together in a scene without any dialogues exchanged with each other.
We can see from the graph that there are four characters that stand out in regards to the number of connections, or a lack thereof: Tom’s date, Jeff Allen, Michael Lawrence, and the theatre girl. And within the context of the story, problems arise either directly or indirectly due to these characters. For example, Jeff Allen was the source of Ben’s misinformation regarding how to behave around a girl. And Ben’s act of kindness towards an upset girl led her to kiss him without notice, which was seen by Sarina. Then, we can somewhat deduce that the characters outside of the normal sphere of connections between friends and family may play a role in bringing instability and confusion between characters. We can also see that Sarina and Ben are the most central characters based on the number of common connections shared with each other, but Ben has more extraneous connections.
However, it is hard to see what kind of interactions or relationships the characters had with each other. The network graph is a very limited representation of the characters’ connections, and it reveals no information about the quality of the connections or its significance. We can wrongly assume that Sarina was a part of Ben’s social circle previous to the prom night or that Ben is well acquainted with Michael Lawrence. We can possibly weigh the connections, but the nature of the story does not provide enough information to incorporate weight into network graph. Therefore, the graph can be helpful in understanding some of the connections between characters in relation to events, but it can also be deceiving.