My Rant on Character as Voice and Reading Response to Dybek’s Thread

OMG, I’ve got to unlearn everything from the last almost 25 years!  I’ve been dutifully employed this entire time at a job that has been methodically crushing my soul and draining the creativity out of me.  I can now barely write dialogue.  Through the endless taking of minutes and interview summaries, I have become expert at summarizing dialogue.  It is efficient and objective, but so incredibly boring.  Now, when I write dialogue in my creative pieces, it is as if I can only express things in black and white.  As if, I am blind to the colors out there.  I am freaking out.  I’ve got to go back out there and start listening again, and start paying attention to all of the things that I have been trained to ignore.  If Ms. Kingsbury purses her lips and leans forward before she asks, “How did you arrive at these numbers?” at the next investment committee meeting, I am going to be taking note of these details as well.  Not just the what, but the how and the why she is saying something.

Okay, I am shifting from my rant to my response now.

When I first read Dybek’s Thread, I wondered why Burroway had included the piece in her chapter on character.  From this reading, I could clearly see an example of character as thought since the piece is a memoir in first person.  The narrator, obviously, is a character in the story, but that was almost too obvious.  Even, I, in my stunted creative development could see that.  So I read the piece again and tried to find examples of some of the other points that Burroway had made about character.  And I began to identify and appreciate what I could learn from the other characters in the reading.  For example, I identified the group of other Knights of Christ as flat characters who served to illustrate the image of an army of pious, eager recruits who dutifully wore their uniforms, marched, rose in unison, and were looked upon as troops.  And then I spotted the stock characters.  Pious Sister Mary Barbara who zealously sewed the sashes worn by the Knights and instructed them on their duties, but whose name was actually taken after the patron saint of fireworks and artillery.  There were also the various Saints who had powers likened to superheroes. I noticed also, the weeping old women who would walk on their knees and the ones who would faint from fasting.  I also appreciated the conflict represented in the narrator’s yearning to perform his duty as a Knight without sinning even though he had broken his fast.  I was engrossed in the action that resulted from his discovery that he had inadvertently broken his fast and was about to commit a mortal sin.  I appreciated the buildup to the moment before receiving Communion and the sincere, masterful way the narrator was able to perform both his duty, yet avoid the mortal sin.  Above all, I was struck by the irony of it all, that it was this “finest hour as a theologian” that the narrator would remember when he asked himself how he had lost his faith.