Dec 31, 2009

Anna Christie | Characters

Mat Burke
Chris Christopherson, Anna’s father, rescues Mat at sea. Mat is employed as a stoker (a person who tends a ship’s furnace and supplies it with fuel) aboard ocean liners. Thirty-year-old Mat is ‘‘a powerful, broad-chested six-footer, his face handsome in a hard, rough, bold, defiant way . . . [and is] in the full power of his heavy-muscled, immense strength.’’ He has very traditional attitudes about women and their place in society, but he loves Anna enough to accept her past. Unlike Chris, Mat believes that his destiny is shaped by his own...