Character
Tichy is a space explorer whose interplanetary experiences are chronicled in The Star Diaries. He also moves in scientific circles on Earth; he is invited to the Futurological Congress in Costa Rica and his endorsement and approval are sought by a number of researchers and inventors on the edge of their field, such as Doctor Diagoras who has developed an artificial intelligence which is independent of mankind, and Decantor who has invented an immortal soul.
Tichy himself is the narrator in all the stories in which he appears. Sometimes he is the main protagonist; sometimes he merely serves to introduce some other character who has a story to tell. He is unmarried, usually well-meaning, accident-prone, and commendably honest about his failures, which include (thanks to another unfortunate experience with time) the entire Universe as we know it.
Read more about this topic: Ijon Tichy
Famous quotes containing the word character:
“A faithful lover is a character greatly out of date, and rarely now used but to adorn some romantic novel, or for a flourish on the stage. He passes now for a man of little merit, or one who knows nothing of the world.”
—Anonymous, U.S. women’s magazine contributor. Weekly Visitor or Ladies Miscellany, p. 20 (April 1803)
“To arrive at a just estimate of a renowned man’s character one must judge it by the standards of his time, not ours.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“Consider the difference between looking and staring. A look is voluntary; it is also mobile, rising and falling in intensity as its foci of interest are taken up and then exhausted. A stare has, essentially, the character of a compulsion; it is steady, unmodulated, “fixed.””
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)