In some works of literature, a character who appears briefly, or does not appear at all, is a significant presence. Choose a novel or play of literary merit and write an essay in which you show how such a character functions in the work. You may wish to discuss how the character affects action, theme, or the development of other characters. Avoid plot summary.
~AP Literature Open Essay Prompt, 1994

Peripheral Presence

Having your name in the title of a book doesn’t mean you get to be in the spotlight. Take the classic 1897 gothic horror novel Dracula, by Bram Stoker. The eponymous vampire appears in person surprisingly little, and only once after his initial conversations with Jonathan Harker. Despite this, he still very much deserves the honor of the novel’s title. His actions set the events of the novel in motion, and the main characters talk of nothing else but him. While not directly seen, his actions leave tangible consequences on Lucy, Mina, and Renfield, and his offstage plotting leaves the heroes struggling to keep up, to determine his motives and his next movements before he can execute on them. While he rarely physically shares the same space as our heroes, their knowledge of Dracula’s constant scheming and plotting spurs them to act decisively, take risks, and in a variety of ways give their life’s blood in service of his destruction. In a sense, Dracula is the one who turns them into heroes.

At the start of the novel, solicitor Jonathan Harker is brought to Dracula’s estate in the Carpathians to help close the sale of some British land to the Count. Harker is welcomed into Dracula’s castle, sight unseen, put up in one of the castle’s gorgeous rooms and treated as an honored guest. At home in his castle in the mountains, Dracula clearly feels comfortable enough in his power to invite a random human into his home. He must not see Harker as much of a threat – and, truth be told, he is correct. Harker is not a threat – at first. Through repeated contact with Dracula and his genteel but immutable scheming, Harker becomes more and more aware that he is being held prisoner in the castle, and more and more determined to escape his gilded cage. Finally, he summons up the courage to scale the outside wall of the castle in an attempt to catch Dracula unawares. “The chances are desperate, but my need is more desperate still. I shall risk it. At the worst it can only be death; and a man’s death is not a calf’s, and the dreaded Hereafter may still be open to me.” (P. 93) Dracula’s presence and true nature have given Harker a new perspective on risky behavior, namely, that death is not the worst thing that could happen to him, and that he would actually rather die doing a courageous thing than be slaughtered to the vampires like livestock.

After leaving the Carpathians and traveling to Whitby by sea, Dracula begins turning Lucy. We do not see this happen in person; rather we see our main characters responding to Lucy’s curiously declining health. Over the course of two weeks, all four of the male main characters donate blood to her in a series of transfusions. Each one seems to work until the next morning, when she is found to be even paler and sicklier than before, prompting Quincey to exclaim, “Ten days!…that poor pretty creature that we all love has had put into her veins within that time the blood of four strong men. Man alive, her whole body wouldn’t hold it…What took it out?” (P.232) In this way, Dracula has invoked one of the main themes of the novel: the equating of blood and life. By draining her blood, Dracula is quite literally stealing her life – and by extension, that of the four men who love her. Blood transfusions in this time period were a very risky operation, especially when performed without a proper operating theater. These four strong men who love her are giving their life’s blood to save her – a theme that will continue throughout the novel.

Once poor Lucy has been released from her undeath, the thoughts of the men turn irrevocably to Dracula. Only Harker has seen Dracula in person, and yet all five men feel an intense hatred of the vampire and an intense desire to ensure that what happened to Lucy does not happen to anyone else. Their conversations and constant stewing over Dracula’s whereabouts and motives are a large part of what shapes them into heroes, helped along by their connection with Mina. Harker’s wife is read in to their plans and, though they encourage her to shelter herself from the actual dirty work, she assists them through philosophical conversations about the vampire, his motives, and his nature.

“I know that you must fight – that you must destroy even as you destroyed the false Lucy so that the true Lucy might live hereafter; but it is not a work of hate. That poor soul who has wrought all this misery is the saddest case of all. Just think what will be his joy when he, too, is destroyed in his worser part that his better part may have spiritual immortality. You must be pitiful to him, too, though it may not hold your hands from his destruction.” (P. 420)

Through her sage guidance, the men are able to find a way to pity the creature even as they seek to destroy him – a very heroic attitude to take.

Though their attitude may be heroic, their attempts to act the hero don’t always succeed, thanks to Dracula’s extreme guile and cunning. The men initially urge Mina to stay home while they go about the dangerous tasks involved in the pursuit of Dracula, believing it to be inappropriate work for a woman. This plan backfires when it allows Dracula to successfully put Mina under his thrall. The men catch Dracula in the act – in pretty much the only other physical appearance of Dracula in the novel. After chasing him away and regrouping Mina appears to have survived relatively unscathed, though she is shaken, bitten and bloody. However, when Van Helsing attempts to bless Mina with a piece of sacred wafer it instead burns her flesh, leaving a scar on her forehead. Mina exclaims in the aftermath of this incident, “Unclean! Unclean! Even the Almighty shuns my polluted flesh! I must bear this mark of shame upon my forehead until the Judgement Day.” (P. 406-407) Even though Dracula himself is not physically present – and indeed, is not seen again until the very last pages – Mina’s ‘polluted flesh’ serves as a painful and tangible reminder of the creature’s presence.

Dracula’s presence also has a tangible effect on Dr. Seward’s ‘zoophagous’ patient, Renfield. Dracula’s estate, Carfax, is next door to the asylum, and the reader gradually begins to realize that they can tell whether Dracula is home or away based on Renfield’s behavior. Renfield gives up his zoophagous obsession at one point, and based on his ramblings the reader understands that this is because he believes Dracula is coming to rescue him. Dracula comes home to Carfax, and the reader knows this not because Stoker shows him coming home, but because Renfield escapes the asylum. Seward finds Renfield pressed against the door of Carfax’s chapel, muttering “I am here to do Your bidding, Master. I am Your slave, and You will reward me, for I shall be faithful. I have worshipped You long and afar off.” (P.170) In my annotated edition by editor Leslie Klinger, an annotation on this sequence points out that there has been no communication that we know of between Dracula and Renfield, so “this again seems to be confirmation that Dracula in some way transmits his presence to those sensitive enough to detect it.” Just as Mina is linked to Dracula through his thrall and can be hypnotized into seeing through his eyes, Renfield is linked to Dracula in some supernatural way, and this in turn affects his behavior.

While Dracula may not show his face very often, his presence is keenly felt by all six of Stoker’s central characters. Urged on by Dracula’s seemingly-unstoppable offstage scheming, our protagonists perform (and undergo) emergency surgical procedures, cut the head off of a beloved young lady’s corpse, break into houses, and chase gypsies across foothills – all activities that would be practically unthinkable when we first meet them. From the very first castle wall scaled by a mild-mannered lawyer to the final knife wound suffered by a heroic American cowboy, Dracula’s lurking peripheral presence pushes our protagonists to take ever greater risks, and inadvertently shapes them into the heroes who will ultimately destroy him.

AP Literature Open-Ended Prompt, 1975, #2:

Unlike the novelist, the writer of a play does not use his own voice and only rarely uses a narrator’s voice to guide the audience’s responses to character and action. Select a play you have read and write an essay in which you explain the techniques the playwright uses to guide his audience’s responses to the central characters and the action. You might consider the effect on the audience of things like setting, the use of comparable and contrasting characters, and the characters’ responses to each other. Support your argument with specific references to the play. Do not give a plot summary.

The Blanks Left Empty

Narration is often the crux of the novelist’s art. Through skillful use of narration and point of view, a novelist can make his readers acutely aware of not just the events of the novel, but the characters’ opinions of those events. This makes it easy for a skilled novelist to deftly control how his readers respond to the work. The playwright, on the other hand, has no such tool at his disposal. Plays very rarely have a narrator or any sort of explanatory text that is not part of the dialogue or stage direction. How, then, does a playwright guide his audience’s responses to the action and characters? How does he communicate his theme or commentary without the use of narration?

The playwright has numerous other tools to convey his point, all of which stem primarily from the fact that theater as a medium is more open to abstraction. Much of theater, no matter how grand the production, depends on the audience’s imagination to fill in the blanks. A single ornate desk might represent a general’s field office; a simple black ladder might represent a second-floor balcony. The playwright relies on the unspoken agreement that the audience will fill in the rest of the details with their imagination. Even if the general’s office is completely built out in shining gold paint, there is one wall missing, the one through which the audience sees the action. And the building outside the office does not exist. Because of this unspoken agreement, audiences are prepared to see events play out that would not, strictly speaking, be possible, and the suspension of disbelief is even stronger when the play is observed live. Assassins, by Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman, is an example of a play which uses this implied agreement to devastating effect.

Assassins, which is based on an idea by Charles Gilbert, Jr., is an abstract musical centered around the men and women who, over the years, have killed or tried to kill the President of the United States. The central theme of the play is a dark reflection of the ‘American dream’; the idea that if any kid can grow up to be the President, then it follows that any kid can grow up to kill the President. The play explores potential motives for the various assassins and seeks to humanize them, to make them more than just “footnotes in a history book” (to use Sarah Jane Moore’s words from the final scene). The primary way Assassins achieves this is through its use of setting.

Assassins makes heavy use of the theater concept of ‘limbo,’ a neutral stage space with little or no sets and props, that places the characters in a realm devoid of context. With a few exceptions, the people depicted in Assassins lived in completely different times and locations from one another, but the play places them all in a shared space – limbo – that can become whatever is necessary to communicate the theme at hand. The bulk of the play is presented in vignettes, isolated sequences that center around each of the assassins. Their story is portrayed in one or two songs, loosely threaded together by the occasional ‘limbo’ scene with more than one assassin conversing, or the pseudo-narration of the audience surrogate character, the Balladeer. We’ll get to him in a moment.

This extensive use of limbo has a few distinct effects on the audience’s response. First, the abstract nature of the setting makes it possible to portray multiple sides of an event simultaneously in the same space, such as when Guiseppe Zangara’s story depicts his execution over top of a chorus of excited witnesses gushing about the minor fame they received from being nearby. The following dialogue, taken from the final chorus of the song “How I Saved Roosevelt,” happens with the witnesses clustered around a microphone located immediately behind Zangara’s electric chair, so that they all share the same spotlight center stage.

“ZANGARA:
And why there no photographers? For Zangara no photographers! Only capitalists get photographers! No right!
WITNESSES:
Lucky I was there!
No fair, nowhere – so what?
I’m on the front page, is that bizarre?!
No sorry!
And all of those pictures, like a star!
And soon, no Zangara!
Just lucky I was there!
We might have been left
Who care?
Bereft of F!
Pull switch!
No luck, no more, no…!
D!
R!”

Zangara never gets to finish that sentence – the chair is activated, and the witnesses hit their final high note over his convulsing form. This use of juxtaposition in limbo space helps to drive home the way that we tend to downplay the plight of the assassin. We get wrapped up in our own little victories and forget that for someone to be driven to kill, they must have stakes high enough to kill for.

Limbo is also used to compare and contrast the various assassins, showing how their stories mirror and support each other. Portions of different but parallel stories occur in the same space and time, allowing characters to display complimentary facets of their personalities to the audience without showing them to each other. This is true of the song “Unworthy Of Your Love,” wherein John Hinckley and Lynette ‘Squeaky’ Fromme sing a love duet, not to each other, but to their respective infatuations with others who barely notice them. The theme of “find[ing] a way to earn your love” drives both of them to the same desperate act despite their different circumstances.

Of course, limbo is a magical place, and sometimes these characters do interact. Whenever they do it gives the play a sort of otherworldly feeling, a surreal tone that somehow allows John Wilkes Booth and Sam Byck to exist in the same time and place. Two full-company scenes of this type roughly bookend the musical, one at the beginning in a nebulous barroom, and another near the end when the assassins reunite in the Texas Book Depository to persuade Lee Harvey Oswald to join their ranks. During these large group scenes, the assassins bounce ideas and themes off of each other, which allows the audience to see the playwrights’ ideas more directly and begin to form a response. At the start of the play, these ideas are directed at the general unfairness of the world at large, and the themes that emerge are those of desperate attempts to fix it:

“ZANGARA: What should I do?
BOOTH: Have you thought about killing President Roosevelt?
ZANGARA: Do you think it will help?
BOOTH: It couldn’t hurt.”

By the time Oswald is revealed, though, the audience has already watched these men and women go through their own stories, with varying degrees of success and fulfillment. Their ideas and themes thus become driven by the need to convince this meek, frustrated, suicidal man to perform one powerful act that will “revive and give meaning” to all of their stories.

“MOORE: You think you can’t connect? Connect to us!
CZOLGOSZ: You think you’re powerless? Empower us!
BOOTH: It’s in your grasp, Lee. All you have to do is move your little finger. You can close the New York Stock Exchange.”

These types of conversations help the playwrights get across a few potential reasons why these men and women would have done something this extreme, both from the characters’ perspectives and the unsaid ones brought about by their interactions.

Limbo is a powerful enough tool on its own, but in Assassins it is joined by another, equally powerful one: the audience surrogate character. An audience surrogate is a character who presents the perspective that is most likely shared by the audience, who can ask the burning questions the audience might have and force the characters to display their themes more obviously. In Assassins, this character is the Balladeer, a ‘normal’ American who tells the stories of the Assassins through bits of sung narration. Besides introducing the stories, though, the Balladeer has a definite opinion about the assassins; they’re poor, misguided nobodies who have been stepped on and largely forgotten by the country, subjects suitable for pity and derision. He says what most of us would have probably thought about the assassins – if we ever thought about them at all. He dismisses their plights as selfish or small, not worthy of the extreme reactions they had to them:

“BALLADEER: They say your ship was sinking, John,
You’d started missing cues.
They say it wasn’t Lincoln, John,
You’d merely had
A slew of bad
Reviews…”

Of course, this being limbo, the assassins won’t let him get away with that kind of abuse without a fight. Even the above stanza, sung as John Wilkes Booth attempts to dictate his indictment of Lincoln, is punctuated by Booth telling him repeatedly to “Shut up!”. Over the course of the play, the audience grows to empathize with the assassins, and starts to hate the Balladeer’s antagonism and dismissiveness of them. By the time the song “Another National Anthem” comes around near the end of the play, the audience is downright relieved to see the assassins finally turn on the Balladeer, overpowering his voice with their combined chorus and driving him off the stage so that they can finish their last chorus uninterrupted. The Balladeer is the embodiment of our tendency to ignore the darker parts of history, the people who ended up on the so-called ‘losing’ side.

On a related note, with this moment we can see as well the importance of the impact of direction on a play. Plays are meant to be staged and performed, and the production team can make choices that can enhance, detract, or add additional commentary layers onto an already complex production. In the 2004 Broadway revival of Assassins, director Joe Mantello chose to have actor Neil Patrick Harris play not just the Balladeer, but Lee Harvey Oswald as well. During “Another National Anthem,” where the script says the assassins force the Balladeer offstage, this production has them instead surround him, forcing him to the ground and concealing him from the audience as they sing the final refrain, then taking his flannel shirt and leather jacket to reveal the white T-shirt and blue jeans of Lee Harvey Oswald as the song concludes. This directing choice throws a dart into the idea that with enough antagonism, anyone can be turned into an assassin. Even the one person who has been spouting the traditional ‘American dream’ narrative the whole time, pitying the assassins, can be transformed into one by an uncaring world full of hate and vitriol. (Incidentally, Joe Mantello won the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical for his work on that production.)

Just because a play does not have a traditional narrator doesn’t mean the playwright has to suffer the uncertainty of whether or not his work will have the desired effect on the audience. He has a plethora of tools at his disposal and can take the full potential of the medium into account when creating a work. I chose to focus primarily on the idea of ‘limbo’ as a setting for this essay, but there are countless other ways to drive home a point with finesse and subtlety through the medium of theater. When you take into account directing, production and acting choices, the playwright never has to fear that his audience won’t get the point. They’ll come into the theater expecting to fill in the blanks, and all he has to do is leave those blanks in the appropriate places.