Character Analysis Of Callie And Marie In George Saunders Puppy

Callie and Marie: Different Ideas of Perfect

Often, we find our assumptions of people flawed, and our ideas of others are riddles with perceptions we have created without knowing the background of who we’ve placed judgment on. That’s exactly the conflict portrayed in George Saunders short story “Puppy”. Callie and Marie are the protagonists of the story that drive the plot. Callie is a married mom of three kids struggling to get by. Bo, Callie’s son, has undisclosed problems that make him act out which resulted in Callie attempting to put him on medication. However, the result of the medicine was symptoms of violent outbursts and teeth shattering. In a last-ditch effort to save her son, Callie tied Bo to a tree outside of her house where …show more content…
This allows the reader to navigate the perspectives of the two main characters, Callie and Marie, both of whom’s life seem to be alike, and different at the same time. Throughout the short story, the reader gets limited, but alternating perspectives that ultimately helps draw the conclusion of Marie and Callies “perfect” ideals, and how they're intertwined. The style of the story is told in a vignette, that highlights the life of both women through broken up sections equally distributed one after another. The narrator only knows the thoughts and feelings of the characters and can only see what the character reveals. The narrator in “Puppy” is only able to identify and draw conclusions from the minds and actions of Callie and Marie, which allows the reader to create their own interpretation of what’s going on, rather than if Callie or Marie had been telling the story in their own voice. This means that all though the insight given by Marie and Callie is reliable, there can be bias because we are hearing things from their thoughts, which makes them more naive and judgmental to each other. The narrator is not all knowing since we don’t know the perspective of every character, and we don’t hear the story from a first-person vantage …show more content…
When reflecting on loving her kids, Marie recounts some of the troubling memories of her childhood, “At least she’d never left one of them standing in the blizzard for two hours after a junior-high dance. At least she’d never drunkenly snapped at one of them…” ( Saunders, 174). This highlights an inner battle for Marie to parent her kids the way she wished she had been. Marie's struggles growing up make her a vulnerable character as it relates to Bo, Callie’s son. While Bo has not been neglected like Marie, Marie while walking through Callie’s house and see’s Bo tied up, assumes Bo is tied to the tree as a form of abuse, which triggers Maries memories of from her childhood, “She remembered coming out of the closet to find her mother’s scattered lingerie and the ditchdigger’s metal hanger full of orange flags. She remembered waiting outside the junior high in the bitter cold… God, she would have killed for just one righteous adult to confront her mother, shake her, and say, “You idiot, this is your child…” (Saunders, 176). Despite seeing herself in Bo, Maries decides not to take the puppy from Callie, in the hopes to avoid contributing to the situation. By Marie not confronting Callie about Bo, she never learned the circumstances Callie was under, and the reason Callie was selling the dog. If the story was written in the first person, the reader would have a better understanding of the