The Character In Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge

Many writers speak about their beginning ideas for stories or novels. For some it may have been a line of narration or dialogue that came magically into mind. Maybe the story derived from a true instance or encounter and the characters, the plot, follows, and develops. Or it’s a certain voice. The voice of a person that has something important to say. The voice, if listened to, turns into a character. That character may then turn into the protagonist. The writer would hope that this character is someone she can spend pages and pages with—someone who is complex and thinks in interesting ways. Most importantly, she would certainly hope that this fabrication seems anything but fabricated, but instead like a real human living a real life, that
Specifically the character and protagonist in many of the stories, Olive Kitteridge. Olive is a woman who was born, raised, and still lives in the small town of Crosby, Maine. But Olive and the people who reside with her in Crosby have problems that are not so small. In a beginning story, Olive’s former math student grapples with the decision to end his life. Like Olive, suicide runs in his family and the memories, the molds of his family's past haunt him. Olive’s own son Christopher battles with depression throughout several stories and the ever stressful relationship with his mother. The list goes on, and the simple lives one would imagine for those living in this small town is not the case for Strout’s characters. It is not just from each stories’ dramatic events that we see, understand and empathize with the characters. It is through our access to several key characters like Olive and her husband Henry where readers become invested in their lives and
Readers infer that Olive is bitter about the attention the widow receives from Henry, but mostly, we are made to believe that Olive has no idea of the struggles or the intellectual deepness of her husband’s thoughts. Before understanding this, we need to examine how readers see Henry, then who Olive sees, which is entirely different from our view. Also, most of the examples that follow have little to do with the dramatic events in the story. They have everything to do with Olive and Henry’s relationship and how they see one another. For example, in the opening paragraph of Pharmacy we have immediate indirect interior monologue. The second sentence in the text reads, “Retired now, he still wakes early and remembers how mornings used to be his favorite, as though the world were his secret, tires rumbling softly beneath him and the light emerging through the early fog, the brief sight of the bay off to his right, then the pines, tall and slender, and almost always he rode with the window partly open because he loved the smell of the pines and the heavy salt air, and in the winter he loved the smell of the cold” (Strout 3). This immediate access into Henry’s interiority does many things. First, it provides us with his intuitiveness, his close attention to detail. It takes a special kind of person to remember and think of the early morning drives to work in such awe. He remembers vivid images