Internal Characters In Fifth Business

Life is never easy, as people do good and terrible things but mostly life is about the challenges of either being known or know what you feel. In the book Fifth Business, by Robertson Davies, explores many ideas and many feelings, but one idea spilt into two stays’ throughout. The idea of an internal character or spirit of one versus the characters that worry about external things, like appearance and materialistic objects. The ideal characters that would fit into these acquisitions is Boy Staunton, Paul Dempster and Dunstable Ramsay. One will learn which are internal and which are external or a hint of both. First up is Boy Staunton, he is the popular, rich, spoiled boy from the beginning to the end, originally named Percy Boyd Staunton, he is one of the major external characters. He wants …show more content…
He has many aspects of external and internal feelings. For example, he just like Boy wants to be known but not the richest man or anything, but as a great magician. As Paul says to Dunny and Boy “So I was chained to Willard by fear; I was his thing and his creature, and I learned conjuring as a reward.” (Davies,245). Paul is telling Boy and Dunny how he was treated/ what he had to do to get famous. This proves how Paul is similar to Boy being materialistic, as Paul became a sex slave to one of the greatest magicians of his time to learn magic and become the best, while giving up his innocents. Paul makes himself look like a major external person by going through the rape for something materialistic. Furthermore, Paul also just wants to become his own person leaving behind a lot of his past for that, demonstrating him being a mix of both internal conflicts and external. The main objective of Paul is to get way from his past, majorly from his mother as Paul responds to Dunny “I lifted the casket that contained Mary Dempster’s ashes. “Do you want to take this with you,