The Sunlight Dialogues: Analysis of Major Characters
"The Sunlight Dialogues" explores the complex interplay of despair, responsibility, and human connection through the lives of its major characters, primarily set in the fictional town of Batavia, New York. Central to the narrative is Taggert Faeley Hodge, known as the Sunlight Man, a once-idealistic individual transformed by tragedy and bad luck into a figure of cynicism and despair. His dialogues with Police Chief Fred Clumly reveal a clash between modernity and traditional ideals, as Clumly grapples with his own frustrations and seeks to understand the Sunlight Man amidst rising crime rates.
The story also delves into the dynamics of the Hodge family, particularly through figures like Arthur Hodge, Sr., whose rigid ideals create a legacy of guilt and fragmentation for his children. Will Hodge, Sr., and his estranged wife Millie represent the burdens of familial expectations and personal failures, while their son Luke embodies the struggle between youthful idealism and harsh reality. Other characters, such as Ben Hodge and Esther Clumly, further illustrate the theme of seeking connection and meaning in a fragmented world.
The narrative weaves humor with profound insights into human relationships, ultimately questioning the nature of love, responsibility, and the search for redemption. Readers are invited to explore the characters' journeys, highlighting the interplay of individual choices and their consequences within a larger societal context.
The Sunlight Dialogues: Analysis of Major Characters
Author: John Gardner
First published: 1972
Genre: Novel
Locale: Batavia, New York
Plot: Psychological realism
Time: August, 1966
Taggert Faeley Hodge, a gifted man of forty years, plagued by bad luck, which transforms a gentle idealist into the cynical, fire-scarred Sunlight Man. Having failed in all of his efforts to save his wife from insanity and his children from death, he returns to his native Batavia, New York. He is arrested for painting the word “love” on a city street, and he begins using magic tricks to undermine people's faith in law and order and in love. His four “dialogues” with Police Chief Fred Clumly, following the Sunlight Man's escape, are at once seriously learned and blackly humorous, intelligent and insane. Set apart from the rest of humankind as much by his despair and nihilism as by his stench and blasted appearance, he chooses in the end to give himself up, only to be shot dead by a nervous police officer.
Fred Clumly, Batavia's sixty-four-year-old police chief. His beady eyes, large nose, and white, completely hairless body make him a particularly conspicuous figure, especially at the funerals he likes to attend. One year short of retirement, he has become increasingly critical of the modern age. As the crime rate soars, his frustrations, weariness, and paranoia grow, fueled by his noble but decidedly old-fashioned belief in personal responsibility. In a highly irregular maneuver, he agrees to meet secretly with the Sunlight Man following the latter's escape. As a result, he loses his job but acquires a deeper understanding of who and what the Sunlight Man is. This understanding culminates in the speech Clumly delivers at the end of the novel, which enables him to rise above the merely personal and to affirm those “connections” that bind self to community and the individual to the ideal.
Arthur Hodge, Sr., a congressman and patriarch, the builder of Stony Hill, the now-ruined family estate. He was a man of superior mind and virtue blessed by good fortune. His absolutism, perfection, and idealism come to tyrannize his survivors as they try to live in a less pastoral, more ambiguous age, which the congressman himself foresaw. His wholeness of being and vision lives on in fragmented form, in the specializations of each of his children.
Will Hodge, Sr., the oldest of the congressman's five children. A country lawyer and inveterate toggler committed to shoring up the fragments against last year's ruins, he is a dependable, rueful man, “comfortable in the cage of his limitations” but burdened by guilt and the responsibility he feels for his former wife, his two sons, and his brother Tag, indeed for all humankind.
Millie Jewel Hodge, Will's former wife. Born poor, she tries to win the love of Ben Hodge, drawn by his strength and freedom. Rejected, she takes her revenge by marrying Will (whom she does come to love briefly) and by destroying Stony Hill, and the Hodges with it. Imprisoned by the Sunlight Man, she struggles to maintain her existential autonomy—“I exist, no one else”—but fails. Seeing Tag and hearing the news of her son Luke's death restores this Circe to the world of forgiveness and love.
Luke Hodge, Millie and Will's twenty-two-year-old son. He has an enormous tolerance for the pain caused by his own histamine headaches and his having witnessed his parents' endless bickering. His elephantine ears undermine his romantic tragic-hero pose, just as his will to believe undermines his hard-earned yet nevertheless not-entirely-convincing cynicism. Kept a prisoner in his own house by the Sunlight Man (his uncle), Luke undergoes a significant change. He transforms his adolescent rage into a selfless but suicidal act that will put a stop to the Sunlight Man's madness and Nick Slater's murders. Although Luke dies alone (Tag and Nick having jumped from the truck sometime before Luke drives it off the bridge), it is Luke's death that prompts Tag to give himself up.
Ben Hodge, a large but gentle dairy farmer and lay preacher, fifty years old. Married to Vanessa, a cartoonishly fat but very friendly schoolteacher, he finds his freedom in his visionary sermons and in riding his motorcycle. In his youth, he betrayed Millie Jewel's love, but as an adult he has been both faithful and generous toward others.
Will Hodge, Jr., Luke's older brother, a Buffalo lawyer specializing in legal collection. His earlier idealism—largely destroyed by what he learned when he ran his father's unsuccessful political campaign and by his discovery that the legal system deals with technicalities rather than truth—survives in attenuated form in his commitment to his work and to the Civil Rights movement. He spends much of his time futilely and obsessively tracking down the enigmatic (and, Will believes, dangerous) R. V. Kleppmann.
Esther Clumly, the police chief's blind wife. She met Fred while he was on leave from the Navy and she was a student at the Batavia Blind School, before the onset of the disease that made him “grublike” and before the failure of the operation she underwent to restore her sight. Aging, childless, and emotionally estranged from her husband, she takes refuge in religion, tippling, and self-pity. Her attempt to protect Fred from an imagined conspiracy backfires and contributes to his losing his job. When officials come to the house to collect the tape recordings he has made of the Sunlight Man's dialogues (evidence that will incriminate Fred), Esther comically yet nobly tries to hold them off.
Dominic Sangirgonio, also called Miller, a police captain whom Clumly thinks of both as a son and as a rival. A former Marine, he tries as best he can to help Clumly, only to be rebuffed. Eventually (or so the mayor claims), he comes to believe that he can no longer trust the chief.
Stan Kozlowski, who joined the police force to escape his father's farm. Although he may at times be working outside the law (in protecting a prostitute and in accepting free meals), Clumly is nevertheless drawn to Kozlowski, whose ambiguous silence and apparent imperturbability, Clumly says, make a man think. As the story progresses, he becomes more and more Clumly's sole companion and confidant.
John Figlow, Clumly's desk sergeant, who dreams of escaping his unhappy marriage. When the Sunlight Man returns to surrender, it is Figlow who shoots and kills him, understanding only as he fires that the Sunlight Man is not dangerous this time, only once again clowning.
Mickey Salvador, the young, overly trusting police officer who is shot and killed by Nick Slater during the jail break.
Walter Benson, a short, fat, and slightly hunchbacked man who his enormously fat wife, Marguerite, believes is a traveling salesman but who in fact has for the past twenty-two years been the small-time professional thief Walter Boyle. Witness to all that is said and done during his pretrial term in the Batavia jail, he chooses not to become involved, despite the price others must pay for his passivity. He and the Sunlight Man know each other's actual identities (Tag once defended Boyle). Miller, too, discovers Boyle's real identity, but Clumly refuses to use Miller's evidence in court. Returning to Buffalo, Boyle, now Benson, learns that his wife is having an affair with their boarder. Benson, taking heart from the kitsch poetry he loves to read, decides not to kill the boarder.
Ollie Nuper, Benson's boarder, a man with a silly face, a passion for radical causes, and a distaste for the hypocrisy of others but a self-pitying tolerance for his own. His civil rights activities bring him into contact with Will Hodge, Jr. He is murdered by local neo-Nazis and secretly buried by Benson, who once again chooses not to become involved.
Nick Slater, an eighteen-year-old American Indian who first comes under Luke Hodge's guardianship and then under Ben's. He and his oafish younger brother, Verne, are in jail for their part in a fatal traffic accident. When the Sunlight Man returns to free the prisoners, Nick alone chooses to go, giving up his cell only to become the Sunlight Man's prisoner and slave. He kills a guard during the break and later, more deliberately, murders Will, Sr.'s landlady, Mrs. Palazzo, and Luke's friendly neighbor, Mr. Hardesty.
Kathleen Paxton, the beautiful only daughter of Clive Paxton, whose overprotection made her both gentle and ill-tempered. She became a teacher, married Taggert Hodge against her father's wishes, and gradually lost her mind, coming to prefer the voices she imagined from the past to the harsh reality of her present. Tag and her brothers have spirited her from sanatorium to sanatorium to keep her from again coming under the tyrannical influence of the father who refuses to admit his responsibility for her illness. It apparently was Kathleen who set the fire in which Taggert was badly burned while trying to rescue their two sons.
Clive Paxton, a merciless, self-made businessman and domestic tyrant, feared and hated by most, including his wife, their sons, and the Hodges. He dies at the age of seventy-six on the night before the arrest of the Sunlight Man, who may be implicated in the death.
Elizabeth Paxton, the invalid wife of Clive Paxton, from whose tyranny she took refuge in the love of Professor Combs.
Walt Mullen, Batavia's mayor, an advocate of the time-cost factor in all government affairs, including police work. He is a small man who speaks in clichés and likes to tell off-color jokes. He turns an informal investigation into the formal hearing that ends with Clumly's ouster. He and Phil Uphill (the city fire chief and another of Clumly's critics), however, are the first to congratulate the former police chief for his powerful end-of-the-novel speech.
Sam White, “the oldest judge in the world.” He gives Clumly two of Taggert Hodge's essays to read, one on “Policework and Alienation,” the other on Harry Houdini, without, however, divulging that Taggert is the Sunlight Man. Asked by Uphill to help depose Clumly, the judge retreats into silence, acting neither for nor against him.
R. V. Kleppmann, the tall, well-mannered son of Polish Jews whom Will Hodge, Jr., obsessively tries to make live up to his financial responsibilities. His cultivated appearance masks his strong dislike of people, whom he tolerates only insofar as he can use them.
Freeman, a young drifter who appears briefly in Batavia wearing a black coat and an Amish hat, accompanying Will Hodge, Sr., as Hodge trails Clumly. He is “the encourager,” but he is also (as Hodge realizes) someone without responsibilities and commitments, who can just pack and leave.