Dec 21, 2009

The Color Purple | Characters

The protagonist of The Color Purple is Celie, a woman whose life is traced over a thirty-year period, from the age of fourteen on a poor sharecropper's farm to success as a middle-aged pants manufacturer. More than half of the novel consists of her letters, addressed first to God and then to her missionary sister Nettie. The epistolary (letter-writing) format guarantees that readers see the story entirely from Celie's point of view, and it affords them the opportunity to trace her growth from ignorant child, to abused and despairing wife, to lesbian lover, to independent and...