Last Requests Characterization

Last Requests
By Giles Smith
Characterization:
Who are the main characters and who are the subordinate characters?
There’s only one main character, and that’s the narrator of the story, who I’ll refer to as ‘The Woman’. The rest are sub characters, the wardens, the prisoners, the husband and the sons.
How are the characters characterized – age, look, characteristics, manner, opinions, how do people see the characters?
The characters are all described by their actions, and the only one who we know for certain a bit about what he looks like is John, one of the wardens. She called him “a yard of pump water”, but that’s all we get. We can guess a bit though. Deadly Dudley for example, it says that he’s really slow, so we can assume he’s not in a very good shape, and possibly fat too.
Are the characters described directly by the narrator or indirectly through action and what they say?
The Woman doesn’t mention anything about anyone’s looks, and since we get all of our info about the other characters from her, we don’t know how any of them look, except for John, as previously mentioned. We can tell a bit about their characters though, through the actions She describes. There’s also a bit of dialogue, which tells us a bit too, but it’s not much.
Are they more or less carefully described (good and bad aspects)?
Since the only information we get is from what The Woman tells us, and she describes the situations more than the people, they’re not very carefully described.
What characters stand in conflict of interests to each other? Describe why.
I’d say probably the general public, who we don’t hear anything about except the ones outside the gates (but they don’t count), and then all the characters in the story. The Woman’s family isn’t really a part of it though, since they don’t have anything to do with the prison, or The Woman anymore either. It’s a bit surprising that the prisoners and the wardens are on the same side, since you’d think they don’t make great friends, but it seems that the wardens are a bit sad about the executions, or at least, they definitely don’t like them, which the prisoners obviously don’t either.
Are there characters that change and are there characters that don’t? Describe how.
Well, we’re told that some of the characters have changed in the past, but since the story is a monologue and probably only spans over a few minutes, none of the characters change during the story. However, you could say that they do, since the story consists of the main character telling stories from the past, during which some characters have changed.
Try to group the positive and negative characters, as the text presents them.
I’d say the only negative characters in the story are the sons, since they don’t come to visit their mum anymore, and just left her in her loneliness after they moved away from home and their father died. The rest of the characters seem positive if you ask me. The prisoners are in a way negative, at least to the rest of the world, but they seem to be fairly nice to the main character, probably because she makes good food for them.