GenreDraft1_BeccaSetlock

Rebekkah Setlock Genre: Character Sketch

Examples: One day in the summer of 1900, my father was riding a lemon-yellow bicycle that went to pieces in a gleaming and tangled moment, its crossbar falling, the seat sagging, the handlebars buckling, the front wheel hitting a curb and twisting the tire from the rim. He had to carry the wreck home amidst laughter and cries of "Get a horse!". He was a good rider and the first president of the Columbus Bicycle Club, but he was always mightily plagued by the mechanical. He was also plagued by the manufactured, which take in a great deal more ground. Knobs froze at his touch, doors stuck, lines fouled, the detachable would not detach, the adjustable would not adjust. He could rarely get the top off anything, and he was forever trying to unlock something with the key to something else.

Mr. Elmo Norman, my elementary school principal, was the most nervous man I have ever met. He was a short, pudgy man, always over-dressed. In fact, he didn't just //wear// his clothes--he hid inside them. His uniform consisted of a neatly pressed pin-striped suit, a thin black tie over a starched white shirt, and a pair of brightly polished brown Oxfords. His receding gray hair was always neatly trimmed, and his fat, wrinkled head always darted about like a radar blip on his neck. He paced the school hallways in a perpetual motion of twitching, fidgeting, and twiddling. In the space of a minute, he would wrinkle his little nose, scratch his plump chin, shrug his shoulders, straighten his tie, and glance at his watch, never once looking directly at the person he was with. As he spoke in his lackadaisical drawl, he would glance at the ceiling, inspect his knuckles, and check the floorboards for dust. When the conversation was over, he would dash back into his office like a frightened bunny, probably praying that he could lock himself in there forever. And for all I know, he may still be hiding there in his office today.

From the very beginning of the novella, Napoleon emerges as an utterly corrupt opportunist. Though always present at the early meetings of the new state, Napoleon never makes a single contribution to the revolution—not to the formulation of its ideology, not to the bloody struggle that it necessitates, not to the new society’s initial attempts to establish itself. He never shows interest in the strength of Animal Farm itself, only in the strength of his power over it. Thus, the only project he undertakes with enthusiasm is the training of a litter of puppies. He doesn’t educate them for their own good or for the good of all, however, but rather for his own good: they become his own private army or secret police, a violent means by which he imposes his will on others. Although he is most directly modeled on the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, Napoleon represents, in a more general sense, the political tyrants that have emerged throughout human history and with particular frequency during the twentieth century. His namesake is not any communist leader but the early-eighteenth-century French general Napoleon, who betrayed the democratic principles on which he rode to power, arguably becoming as great a despot as the aristocrats whom he supplanted. It is a testament to Orwell’s acute political intelligence and to the universality of his fable that Napoleon can easily stand for any of the great dictators and political schemers in world history, even those who arose after //Animal Farm// was written. In the behavior of Napoleon and his henchmen, one can detect the lying and bullying tactics of totalitarian leaders such as Josip Tito, Mao Tse-tung, Pol Pot, Augusto Pinochet, and Slobodan Milosevic treated in sharply critical terms.

Criteria: Usually a paragraph or two describing the character from whatever you're writing about. Provides details about that character such as personality traits, physical appearance, and other obvious physical aspects. Unlike a biography or another in depth study, a character sketch provides an impression of the person rather than their life story or background.

Along with the writing aspect of this genre, I was also going to do a literal sketch of the character to go along with it to kind of tie the whole thing together.

Character: Colonel Hans Landa Rough Draft:

Hans Landa; Colonel in the National Socialist Party armed forces and an expert "Jew Hunter." Upon hearing these things about a charcter, your mind may jump directly to the typical Nazi characterture of a sadistic, outwardly aggravated, violent and unpersonalble. However, Landa completely defies this notion of a conventional totalitarian minion of Adolf Hitler. Throughout the entire movie, he oozes charm and there is no semblance of harshness in any of his actions. Even when interoggating Peter Lapedite, a French countryman suspected of hiding his Jewish neighbors, Landa maintains composure and even a sense of hospitality in the Lapedite home. Complimenting his daughters and being exceedingly kind and reassuring adds to his ruse of compassion. What I believe makes Landa such a fantastic character is that through his apparent chivalrous nature and politeness even towards his enemies, he always has an air of power about him. Hans Landa knows exactly how people's minds work, and has developed an great niche for breaking down the resolve and often composure during his interogations. From his obnoxiously oversized smoking pipe to his keen intuitions about where people are at all times, Landa always seems to be ahead of the game when it comes to his expertise of finding people for the Nazis. He often hides his less than pleasant actions and intentions with a charming smile and an at-ease nature. Landa is the main protagonist in the film, and he provides a stark contrast to that of the leading "Basterd" Aldo Raine. This comparison only exemplifies Landa's character traits; Aldo with his harsh, blunt methods most of the time appears a lot less frigtening than Landa's sinister actions that he covers in a thick layer of charisma and likeability. His true agenda is revealed to the audience towards the end of the film when he finally captures the Basterds and reveals their plans to blow up the theatre hosting the Nazi film premiere of "Nation's Pride." He is completely able to stop the deaths of Hitler and the other key members of his Third Reich, a chance any enlisted man would have given almost anything for. However, he chooses instead to allow the plan to continue in exchange for great personal and social-standing gain for himself. This shows he is not a typical Hitler-worshipping soldier like most of the other Nazi's portrayed in this film and many others; he is smarter than that. In the end, Landa was not a Nazi in the beliefs sense of the term, just an extremly smart man who took advantage of the war to ensure his quality of life.

Sources: Inglorious Basterds; Quentin Tarantino, 2009