Tripmaster Monkey - Characters

Characters

  • Wittman Ah Sing is the protagonist of the novel, with his name being a reference to Walt Whitman. He is an American graduate of the University of California, Berkeley and is of Chinese ancestry. The novel mainly follows his actions and changing attitudes towards his ancestry and life in general. With "partial verification by Kingston", writer Amy Ling believes the character is somewhat based on a critic of the author of the novel, Frank Chin.
  • TaƱa De Weese is a woman who meets Wittman at a wild party, eventually marrying him in order that Wittman can avoid being drafted to fight in the Vietnam War. She is a white American and introduces Wittman to her parents, signifying Wittman's increasing comfort with white American culture.
  • Nanci Lee attended the University of California, Berkeley with Whittam, and dates Whittam at the beginning of the novel. She is relatively conservative and is, like Wittman, an American of Chinese ancestry. Their shared ancestry influences Wittman's decision to ask her out and his emotions during the relationship. She ends their relationship when he does an imitation of the monkey king Sun Wukong from the Chinese epic novel, Journey to the West, in front of her.

Read more about this topic:  Tripmaster Monkey

Famous quotes containing the word characters:

    A criminal trial is like a Russian novel: it starts with exasperating slowness as the characters are introduced to a jury, then there are complications in the form of minor witnesses, the protagonist finally appears and contradictions arise to produce drama, and finally as both jury and spectators grow weary and confused the pace quickens, reaching its climax in passionate final argument.
    Clifford Irving (b. 1930)

    There are characters which are continually creating collisions and nodes for themselves in dramas which nobody is prepared to act with them. Their susceptibilities will clash against objects that remain innocently quiet.
    George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)

    No one of the characters in my novels has originated, so far as I know, in real life. If anything, the contrary was the case: persons playing a part in my life—the first twenty years of it—had about them something semi-fictitious.
    Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)