Steps: Analysis of Major Characters
"Steps: Analysis of Major Characters" delves into the complex psychological landscapes of its main characters, particularly focusing on an immigrant narrator who grapples with alienation in America. Struggling with language barriers and cultural dislocation, he embodies a sense of loss and anger, oscillating between roles of victim and victimizer. His journey reveals a profound internal conflict, as he yearns for control and identity in a harsh, uncaring environment, ultimately resorting to cunning and manipulation to navigate his life.
In contrast, the female character presents a more optimistic yet flawed perspective. She is characterized by her kindness and a desire for understanding, despite her own struggles with honesty and fidelity. Her relationship with the narrator is complex, culminating in a moment of liberation that symbolizes her attempt to leave behind the shadows of their troubled connection.
Readers themselves are invited to confront their own moral complexities through the narrative, facing the unsettling realities of violence and indifference. The text challenges them to reflect on their responses to human suffering and the implications of inaction. Overall, the exploration of these characters offers a rich commentary on identity, power, and the human condition, inviting deeper engagement with the themes presented.
Steps: Analysis of Major Characters
Author: Jerzy Kosinski
First published: 1968
Genre: Novel
Locale: Indeterminate
Plot: Existentialism
Time: Indeterminate
The narrator, sometimes a voyeur and sometimes a participant in the action. This immigrant to America finds that he does not belong. Because of language barriers and culture shock, he becomes a victim of the city, having to steal to stay alive. He appears to be cold and unemotional, but underneath that exterior is tremendous anger, shown when he fantasizes about destroying the city that gives him so much pain. He is a wanderer searching for his self, but because he practices self-deception, the true self within him remains hidden. He yearns for peace and to be in control of his destiny. As he looks for his identity in the ways he affects others, the roles he creates change him from servant to master, from seducer to seduced, and from victim to victimizer. Everything is negative. An incomplete person molded by a brutal world, he lives at the edge of society. He hates what he is and fears what he might become. When he left a communist country, he expected to find a better life, but he is lost in an uncaring, technological wasteland. He tries in various ways to master his environment. He is cunning and devious as he literally transforms himself into someone else to achieve his goals. A good actor, he successfully fakes deaf mutism for a time. He is a college graduate, but he will do menial labor. He parks cars, works at an archaeology dig, as a photographer, cleans the rust off a ship, and drives a truck. He uses people and fanta-sizes about killing them. Highly imaginative but spiritually deprived, he plays games with people. His sexual encounters are games, and he tells about shocking games that he has seen others play. Sex verifies life for him, but he shows no desire to please his partner. He wants revenge against those who have hurt him. His greatest desire is to control others. He wants to belong, but he must be the master of every situation. To him, freedom means power and control.
The woman, whom dialogues show to be kind, to admire fairness, and to think the best of everyone. She does not want to make the protagonist feel bad concerning his sexual performance, and she is interested in what he does. She tries to understand him, but she is ignorant about men and about the world. She asks questions to make him feel smart. A Roman Catholic, she goes regularly to confession but is not always honest with the priest. She is unfaithful and can be a liar. She has strong opinions. For example, she tells her lover that circumcision is a mutilation that is cruel to babies. She enjoys sex and will try new things even if she thinks them sinful. Like the narrator, she wants to understand herself, but she, too, practices self-deception. She may be the woman he leaves at the end of the novel, the woman who dives into the ocean. Many readers assume that she is committing suicide, but Kosinski did not intend for her to do that. He explained her action as a celebration of her freedom. The rotted leaf on the surface of the water is her past relationship with the narrator, and all that is left of it is a shadow. When she comes up out of the water, she will leave it behind.
The reader, who becomes a witness to and a participant in the evil portrayed. Forced to confront his own dark side, his first reaction is to recoil from it in horror, but as the emotional bombardment continues, he begins to accept the violence, the sexual manipulation, and the brutality. In a numbness brought on by the constant assault of Kosinski's cold prose, he becomes indifferent to human suffering and suddenly realizes that he is capable of permitting horrors such as the Holocaust by his own inaction or silence. This realization causes him to feel a sour pessimism about the human condition and to be disgusted with himself.