Gabriel Betteredge In The Moonstone

The place and time of a story hold a great amount of weight on impacting a story, but without characters a story holds no true depth. The settings dictate the overall feelings a reader receives from the story, as for the characters they are depicted from the settings helping piece together the sentences deeper between the lines. Having multiple characters with diverse personalities and behaviors helps see the story from more than one angle. Collins masters this in The Moonstone by using characters with close relationships to the Verinder family, multiple narrators, and characters with suspicious backgrounds.
One character that Collins puts much focus on is the first narrator, Gabriel Betteredge. We grow closer to his character learning his stubborn, witty behaviors. Betteredge’s witty behaviors let’s us connect to the book by character traits we’ve seen in people we know in our daily lives. “I was something dissatisfied with my daughter- not for letting Mr. Franklin kiss her; Mr. Franklin was welcome to that” (Collins, 28). In this passage we see how Betteredge holds humorous
Rosanna has many things going against her, she finds herself in a one way love for Franklin Blake, and is talked about by the house members and other servants for her looks. Nothing seeming to go in her favor Collins also mentions to us her past history of being a thief to give reason to believe she is behind the missing diamond. All these elements of her character help unfold the story because once we find out that she is not in possession of the diamond the initial thought centered around her disappears and we are left to think differently about all the characters. In the end all the tension focused on Rosanna sends her to visit the Shivering Sands. “And the Quicksand, which hid her body, hid her secret too” (Collins, 187) in this we see how the build up against her character results in her committing