Characters
- Jody Tiflin - the young protagonist of The Red Pony is innocent, dedicated, and polite. “He was a little boy, ten years old, with hair like dusty yellow grass and with shy polite grey eyes, and with a mouth that worked when he thought." He is the son of Carl Tiflin and learns to train horses from his role model Billy Buck.
- Billy Buck - Billy Buck is a middle-aged man who is experienced with horses. He works for the Tiflins as the stable helper. "He was a broad, bandy-legged little man with a walrus mustache... The belt showed... the gradual increase of Billy’s middle over a period of years." Billy Buck teaches Jody all there is to know about caring for horses.
- Carl Tiflin - Carl Tiflin is the father of Jody. He likes order and will accept nothing less than a respectable farm. “Jody’s tall stern father came in then." He is strict on Jody, but has a loving touch in him.
- Gitano - Gitano is an elderly man that used to live near Jody’s family’s farm. He and Jody meet in front of the farm, and Jody “ into the house for help.” and returns with his mother. His mother asks Gitano what he wants to do in the ranch. He replies, "'I will stay here... until I die.'" Gitano is not capable of working as well as young farmers, but is a “lean man, very straight in the shoulders."
- Grandfather - Mrs. Tiflin's father, an old man who lives by the seaside and loves to tell old stories and tall tales about his pioneer days, when he boldly led a wagon train of settlers across the continent.
Read more about this topic: The Red Pony
Famous quotes containing the word characters:
“I cannot be much pleased without an appearance of truth; at least of possibility—I wish the history to be natural though the sentiments are refined; and the characters to be probable, though their behaviour is excelling.”
—Frances Burney (1752–1840)
“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)
“The business of a novelist is, in my opinion, to create characters first and foremost, and then to set them in the snarl of the human currents of his time, so that there results an accurate permanent record of a phase of human history.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)