The Best Of Me Character Analysis

In chapter ten of the book, How to Read Literature Like a Professor, Thomas Foster states that “characters are products of writers’ imaginations-- and readers’ imaginations” (81). They are created by past experiences, memories, emotions, and many other elements of the author and reader. Foster claims that the death of a character can move a story’s plot forward. This is also true when the death of a main character’s best friend or extraneous characters die in order to progress the fate of the main character.
In the book The Best of Me by Nicholas Sparks, the main character, or “hero”, is a poor, abused boy named Dawson. He falls in love with a young, rich girl named Amanda. Dawson has a very bad relationship with his father, Frank, that results in a man to man fight between the two over a …show more content…
that make them difficult to handle and often unpredictable (88). In The Great Gatsby, the main character, Jay Gatsby, is a rich man in love with his beautiful, long lost friend Daisy. Daisy is now married to a wealthy, yet selfish, man named Tom. Daisy falls back in love with Gatsby, and they begin to have an affair. As this part of the plot is progressing, Tom is also having an affair with Myrtle, the wife of his mechanic, Wilson. Towards the end of the story, Daisy is angry because everything is being spilled out in the open during a huge argument over the matter. She drives in a car with Gatsby and kills Myrtle by running over her with the car. Gatsby takes the blame and suffers the outcome. The next day, Wilson, Myrtle’s husband, comes to Gatsby’s house and shoots him in his pool. The destiny of Gatsby was altered because of the death of a less important character. This proves Foster’s thesis claiming that the death of a character can advance the main character’s journey through the plot, and also to their