The City and the Pillar | Characters
The hero of this novel, Jim Willard, is accurately enough described as a "dumb bunny" by one of the characters in Two Sisters (1970). He is an incarnation of a certain brand of typically American innocence — a descendant of Billy Budd and Huck Finn and a slightly older brother to Holden Caulfield. Vidal has shrewdly exploited the effect of placing this traditional character in a milieu never before revealed in mainstream fiction, and he has made Jim a sympathetic character by the slowness with which he comes to act on the feelings that he has had from the time of his junior year...
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