Dec 27, 2009

Out of the Silent Planet | Characters

At first Elwin Ransom, the protagonist, is a stock English character: a university don on a walking vacation. But early on, this unwilling hero's ethos becomes convincing as he keeps a pledge to a worried mother despite his reasonable unwillingness to look like a fool. In all of his responses, Ransom achieves psychological verisimilitude: terror at the discovery that he was in space; fear of sorns; near madness when alone on Malacandra; an ecstatic and unbearable curiosity in his first meeting with a hross; grief and guilt at the death of Hyoi; mortification at Weston's foolishness when...