Characters
- The Father - He is the narrator of the story and leads the family. He knows a great deal of information on everything from roots to hunting, demonstrating bravery and self-reliance.
- Elizabeth - The mother. She is intelligent and resourceful, arming herself even before leaving the ship with a "magic bag" filled with supplies, including sewing materials and seeds for food crops. She is also a remarkably versatile cook, taking on anything from porcupine soup to roast penguin.
- Fritz - The oldest of the four boys, he is sixteen. Though he is not the most intelligent, he is the strongest and accompanies his father on many quests.
- Ernest - The second oldest of the boys, he is fourteen. Ernest is intelligent, but a less physically active boy, often described by his father as "indolent". Like Fritz, however, he comes to be an excellent shot.
- Jack - The third oldest of the boys, eight years old. He is thoughtless, bold, vivacious, and the quickest of the group.
- Franz (sometimes rendered as Francis) - The youngest of the boys, he is nearly six when the story opens. He usually stays home with his mother.
- Jenny Montrose - An English girl found on Smoking Rock near the end of the novel. She is shy but soon is adopted into the family.
- Knips - An orphan monkey adopted by the family after their dogs have killed its mother. The family use him as a test subject for unfamiliar foods.
- Fangs - A jackal that was tamed by the family.
Read more about this topic: The Swiss Family Robinson
Famous quotes containing the word characters:
“Of the other characters in the book there is, likewise, little to say. The most endearing one is obviously the old Captain Maksim Maksimich, stolid, gruff, naively poetical, matter-of- fact, simple-hearted, and completely neurotic.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“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)
“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)