Characters
Almost all of the different characters in the story are, in fact, alternate versions of Daniel from another point in time. When Daniel first meets his future self from one day into the future, the future version identifies himself as "Don," ostensibly Daniel's twin brother. The next day, when it becomes Dan's turn to meet a version of himself from yesterday, he adopts the role of Don. (When a third Daniel appears, he is sometimes identifies as Don II, or ultra-Don.) The female version of Danny has a similar relationship with alternate versions of herself; she is Diane when she meets a version of herself from the future, but when she plays the role of the future traveler, she adopts the name Donna. (Diane has an Aunt Jane, who is the elderly version of herself, and the female equivalent of Uncle Jim.) The only named character who is not some version of Daniel is the lawyer who comes to tell him of his Uncle Jim's death, and is identified only as "Biggs-or-Briggs-or-something."
Read more about this topic: The Man Who Folded Himself
Famous quotes containing the word characters:
“Hemingway was a prisoner of his style. No one can talk like the characters in Hemingway except the characters in Hemingway. His style in the wildest sense finally killed him.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)
“White Pond and Walden are great crystals on the surface of the earth, Lakes of Light.... They are too pure to have a market value; they contain no muck. How much more beautiful than our lives, how much more transparent than our characters are they! We never learned meanness of them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We are like travellers using the cinders of a volcano to roast their eggs. Whilst we see that it always stands ready to clothe what we would say, we cannot avoid the question whether the characters are not significant of themselves.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)