Who Has Seen the Wind: Analysis of Major Characters
"Who Has Seen the Wind" explores the complexities of childhood and the impact of loss through its major characters, particularly focusing on Brian Sean MacMurray O’Connal. As a young boy growing up in the Saskatchewan prairie, Brian grapples with themes of life and death, which shape his imaginative and inquisitive nature. His father, Gerald O’Connal, serves as a gentle guide, embodying a sense of responsibility and compassion, while his mother, Maggie, instills resilience and ambition in her sons despite her emotional struggles following Gerald's untimely death.
The narrative also highlights the relationship between Brian and his grandmother, Margaret Biggart MacMurray, showcasing a bond formed through shared experiences of independence and love for nature. Characters like Sean O’Connal and Young Ben further enrich the story, representing different aspects of familial love, resilience against adversity, and the untamed spirit of youth. The presence of educators like Mr. Digby and Ruth Thompson introduces themes of compassion and social justice, enriching the community dynamics. Together, these characters create a vivid portrayal of personal growth amid the harsh realities of life on the prairie.
Who Has Seen the Wind: Analysis of Major Characters
Author: W. O. Mitchell
First published: 1947
Genre: Novel
Locale: A small town in the prairies of Saskatchewan
Plot: Bildungsroman
Time: 1929–1937, during the Depression
Brian Sean MacMurray O'Connal, who ages from four to eleven during the course of the story. A slight, lean, dark “black Scotch” boy, Brian is imaginative and always inquisitive about the rhythms of nature that he witnesses on the sweeping, beckoning, and now drought-ridden Saskatchewan prairie where he lives. By the age of eleven, Brian has experienced the deaths both of cherished pets and of beloved members of his close family, making him mature beyond his years. Always sensitive to the relentless patterns of birth and death around him, Brian perceives aspects of life about which his contemporaries Forbsie Hoffman and Artie Sherry comprehend little. Brian's sturdy independence makes his mother heartsick, but his independence and his extraordinary visionary capacity protect him somewhat from the harsh emotional blows he is dealt so early.
Gerald O'Connal, Maggie's large, auburn-haired husband, Brian and Bobby's father, and the town druggist. A quiet, serious man, as befits his respectable position in the town, Gerald is also gentle and sensitive. It is Gerald who solves the conflict between Brian and his grandmother over Brian's puppy Jappy, who shares Brian's wonder and respects his sorrow over the birth and death of a baby pigeon, who quietly finances his impoverished brother Sean's irrigation project, and who is his wife's model of the kind of person she wants their sons to be. Always concerned for others, he downplays persistent signs of his own ill health and dies suddenly at the age of forty-three of gall bladder disease.
Maggie MacMurray O'Connal, a small, dark, pretty, and intense woman. She loves and admires her husband and cares fiercely about her sons, instilling in them a desire to be strong, worthy, and successful. Ordinarily a person who does not express her emotions, she nevertheless makes them evident on such occasions as the near death of infant Bobby and in her dignified but forceful defense of Brian to his sadistic teacher Miss Macdonald. Although she is devastated by her husband's death, her love and ambition for her sons is undiminished.
Margaret (Maggie) Biggart MacMurray, Maggie O'Connal's mother. Traveling west to homestead with her husband John in 1885, she led the pioneer's hard, challenging life, which she loved, and she delights still to tell her grandchildren about the old days. Now elderly, lame, and increasingly frail, she lives with her daughter's family. At first, she appears an authoritative figure to the small Brian. After Gerald's death, however, a mutual sympathy grows between grandmother and grandson; each appreciates the other's independence and affinity for the natural world. At eighty-two years of age, she dies of pneumonia, seeking the outdoor air at the last.
Sean O'Connal, Gerald's brother and his senior by fifteen years. A huge, profane redhead, never married, Sean loves his brother and his brother's family tenderly, having seen to Gerald's upbringing and education himself. A grain farmer devastated and embittered by the drought of the 1930's, Sean is a man of the future, vainly advocating conservationist plowing, irrigation, and farming methods. After Gerald's death, he encourages Brian's growing interest in agricultural engineering, assuring the boy's future.
Young Ben, the half-wild, wholly unchecked son of the reprobate Old Ben, but really a true child of nature, a noble savage. The shock-haired, gray-eyed, broad-cheeked Young Ben resists all efforts, both sympathetic and vengeful, to tame and educate him, preferring his natural habitat, the broad Saskatchewan prairie. He shares with Brian a compassion for helpless creatures, and he maintains an almost wordless, close, protective relationship with Brian. Young Ben embodies a freedom of spirit that Brian perceives but cannot attain.
Mr. Digby, the elementary school principal, weathered-looking, with a shock of fair hair, very blue eyes, and threadbare clothing. Though improvident, Mr. Digby is a man of compassion and lively intellect, always doing his best to combat the small town's narrowness and bigotry. He releases Young Ben from school, quietly financing the boy's few necessities after Old Ben is jailed, imperiling his own job in the process. He understands the needs of both his students and the many adults to whom he lends a sympathetic ear. Up to now a contented bachelor, he comes to love Ruth Thompson as a kindred spirit as well as a desirable woman.
Ruth Thompson, a dramatically dark-haired and dark-eyed teacher at Digby's school. As compassionate as Digby, she takes overt action against injustice more readily than he does and vanquishes the town bully Mrs. Abercrombie. Breaking for the second time an engagement to the sardonic yet humane town doctor Peter Svarich, she will marry Digby instead.