The MacGuffin: Analysis of Major Characters
"The MacGuffin: Analysis of Major Characters" explores the intricate dynamics between key characters, particularly focusing on Robert Druff, the aging city commissioner. At fifty-eight, Druff grapples with health issues and a sense of existential disappointment, feeling like he is on a futile journey while maintaining a playful yet paranoid narrative style. His wife, Rose Helen, embodies complexity with her own struggles, including a past suicide attempt and her ongoing battle with health concerns. Their son, Michael, despite his adult age, remains dependent on his parents, showcasing a blend of fear and fantasy shaped by his interactions with a character named Su'ad al Najaf, a Lebanese student whose tragic fate intertwines with the unfolding plot.
The concept of the "MacGuffin," popularized by filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock, serves as a critical narrative device within Druff's fantasies, representing the catalyst for action while simultaneously taking on a character-like significance. Additionally, Margaret Glorio, a free-lance buyer, introduces further complications into Druff's life, challenging his notions of intimacy and desire. Through these characters, the narrative delves into themes of inadequacy, obsession, and the search for meaning in the mundane, inviting readers to consider the complexities of human relationships and the often surreal nature of personal narratives.
The MacGuffin: Analysis of Major Characters
Author: Stanley Elkin
First published: 1991
Genre: Novel
Locale: An unnamed city in the American Midwest
Plot: Psychological realism
Time: The 1990's
Robert Druff, also called Bob and Bobbo, the city commissioner of streets. At the age of fifty-eight, wearing his ill-fitting clothes and suffering from heart disease, a collapsed lung, and poor circulation, Druff finds himself “on the downhill side of destiny.” He swallows Valium to calm himself and chews coca leaves to create a sense of “restored obsession,” the antidote to what he otherwise experiences as a vaguely defined loss of force (a strange malady given that Druff never had much force to lose). Alternately overbearing and self-deprecating, ridiculing others and feeling ridiculous, he recognizes his own inconsequence. He is understandably disappointed by his “bozo itinerary” and “pointless odyssey”—his cruising for potholes and reviewing of streets he superintends yet barely knows. Frequently invoking the Marlon Brando line from On the Waterfront, “I could have been a contender,” but realizing that it rings rather hollow, he constructs an increasingly involved and fantastic plot that is at once playful and paranoid. Druff has the starring role as detective/victim.
Rose Helen Druff, his wife of thirty-six years. They met while at college; the fact that her hip problem made her “a relatively presentable cripple” did little to assuage “her savage resentment,” which led to a suicide attempt that in turn led Druff to propose marriage. She later saves him “from the humiliation of his body” following heart surgery. He cannot save his now deaf “Miss Kitty” (one of Druff's many allusions to television shows and films, in this case the television Western Gunsmoke) from her worst fear, that even though she wears her hearing aids to bed,shewillburntodeathinher sleep because the batteries will run down and she will be unable to hear the smoke alarm.
Michael Druff, sometimes called Mikey, their son. Even though he is thirty years old, he still lives with his parents. Despite his manic weight lifting, he is fearful and craven, like his father. Mikey's largely fantasized relationship with Su'ad al Najaf provides Druff with an important element in his own Hitchcock-like fantasy.
Su'ad al Najaf, called Suzy, a Lebanese graduate student who is fatally injured while crossing a city street. Her death, coupled with her Middle Eastern background and Mikey's having known her, lead Druff to concoct a fantastic plot around the Oriental rugs Su'ad was smuggling, using them as the MacGuffin, the Hitchcockian device to set the plot in motion.
Margaret Glorio, a forty-four-year-old free-lance buyer for local department stores. Druff picks her up—“hijacks” her—at Toober's Restaurant. Although he comes on strong, she has sex with him but refuses to become his mistress. Margaret is the one who tells Druff that Su'ad is a rug smuggler.
MacGuffin, film director Alfred Hitchcock's term for the narrative pretext, or riddle, that appears to motivate and integrate a film's incidents. In Druff's fantasy, the MacGuffin takes on a life of its own, in effect becoming a character in its own right. It is the “spirit of narrative in his life” for whom Druff functions as little more than raw material.
Charles, a driver from whom Druff, while hitchhiking one morning, catches a ride. They carry on a conversation that pleasantly surprises Druff because it does not sound like dialogue in a book. Soon, however, Druff does start sounding like someone in a book (not a very good one at that), and Charles is more than happy to get rid of him.