Killer Character Blogfest -- Challenge #3: Antagonist

El Amor En Los Tiempos Del Colera (Love In Times of Cholera, or Love In The Time of Cholera)

Florentino Ariza met Fermina Daza one slow afternoon when she raised her head from a book and met his eyes, "and that look was the origin of a cataclysm of love that half a century later hadn’t yet finished." [My translation]

For fifty-one years, nine months and four days, Florentino and Fermina would not speak privately.  Love arose through letters and chaperoned walks in a park, a love of expected vibrancy given their youth.  But Fermina would soon realize that she’d fallen in love with Love itself, that Florentino was not anything she’d thought he was, and she’d dismiss him from her life to marry a man more in line with her station.

But Florentino did not give up.  He waited patiently, with a debauchery that never threatened the purity of his love for Fermina, for half a century.  The opportunity finally comes, but…  They’re too old, Fermina says.  Florentino’s patience isn’t exhausted and soon, in spite of her disparaging protests, she begins to admit there might still be time for love.  Love, after all, is love regardless of the time or the age.  But it becomes denser the closer one is to death.

Time is the antagonist.  Time is what threatens: Florentino must outlive Fermina’s husband.  Age—evidence of Time’s passage—threatens to make everything pointless.  In the end Florentino thinks he wins: Time, so long against him, is now his ally--not just because proximity to death has intensified everything, but also because the half-century interlude flew them over the trials of love turned routine.  And now…  Now they need only each other.  But Time won't stop, not even on that drifting riverboat with a cholera flag raised.  We're left with the sensation that, however well-lived, their days together will not be many.

Killer Character Blogfest -- Challenge #2: The All-Important Protag

Being a protagonist is hard.  Everything hinges on you: story, action, conflict—to top it off, there’s no privacy.  All your foibles, your deepest fears, desires, stuff you’ve barely found out for yourself—right there on the page for any reader to see.

The Odd Thomas Series, by Dean Koontz
http://www.deankoontz.com/odd-thomas-series/

As enthralled as I am by stories, I always feel a pang of voyeurism-sparked shame at invading foreign lives like that.  Nowhere was that most evident than when I met Odd Thomas.

He’s such a delightful and sensitive kid, that Odd.  So polite, so—normal, in every way but one.  He sees the "lingering dead", and although they don’t speak (not as far as he knows), they do communicate in some way to ask for justice.  Now, another kind of person would ignore them, turn their back, scream and run (sometimes these dead show up with the gore and mess that killed them), or perhaps simply go mad.  But not Odd.  He doesn’t like it, but he accepts that this is his lot with an equanimity that leaves no place for the melodrama of "why me?".  And I love him for that.

Odd touches my heart.  He’s a good, good man—but he doesn’t know it, doesn’t believe it.  Odd Thomas’s humanity jumps out of the page, weaknesses on his sleeve.  He seems almost apologetic for telling his story, for making any claim of importance.

But he is important.  His qualities are in extreme danger of extinction.

Read the other Killer Character 'Fest-ers choices for Killer Protagonists here.

Killer Character Blogfest -- Challenge #1: Supporting Character

Welcome to the Killer Character Blogfest!  Everyone is postulating for their favorite supporting character today--visit this link to take a look at the other entries.

The supporting character I present to you today is, quite literally, a killer.  At least in intention, though not in fact.  He’s been my favorite supporting character since the first time I came across him--over twenty five years ago!

He’s not an obscure character, so I'll give you a chance to guess.  His untimely death gave him eternal youth in our minds, but he’s only slightly younger than Dracula.  He’s unique and timeless, but not undead.  He’s irreverent—a fun-loving joker.  He talks of dreams, he has unpredictable swings.

I believe he knew, at some level, that he would die young.  He’s the embodiment of "carpe diem", in high contrast to the protagonist he supports so ably (a romantic given to writing poetry inspired in platonic love), and I believe the thirst of life of our character is driven by foreknowledge, at a subconscious level perhaps, that he would not live long.

His monologue is famous—pure magic of youth tinged with a fatality that grips the reader (or listener, for it was written to be spoken)—, as is his loyalty: unable to understand why his best friend will not fight the man who has insulted him, he draws his own sword against the threatener and dies.  That thrust of sword under the arm of his best friend sets off the events that culminate in one of the literary world’s most poignant tragedies—so easily avoidable, had pride been less entrenched.

Did you guess Mercutio?