Characters Discussed
Harry “Bo” Mason
Harry “Bo” Mason, a bootlegger, a man who is always looking for greener pastures. When Elsa Norgaard first meets him, he is running an illegal bar in North Dakota. Although he can be charming, he has a nasty temper and sometimes becomes violent. He falls in love with Elsa and marries her. He is energetic but impatient. Simply earning a living is not enough; he wants to make a fortune quickly. When one plan does not work out, he moves his family somewhere else. the longest the Mason family stays in one place is the five years they spend homesteading in Saskatchewan, but the land is too poor to support them. Bo has little regard for the law, and because bootlegging offers the most potential to make money in a hurry, he gives up all pretense at other occupations and becomes a full-time bootlegger. When Elsa is stricken with cancer, he cannot deal with her illness and finds a mistress. After her death, he begins to feel old. His moneymaking schemes fail, leaving him virtually penniless. His mistress rejects him. When he has no more hope or plans for the future, he kills his mistress and then himself.
Elsa Norgaard Mason
Elsa Norgaard Mason, Bo’s wife. When Elsa’s mother died, her father married Elsa’s best friend, a situation with which she could not live. Elsa leaves home when she turns eighteen to live with her uncle in North Dakota. There she meets Bo and is attracted by his dangerous sort of charm, though she feels uneasy about his temper. When her father learns of the romance and disapproves, she marries Bo. Elsa’s main desires in life are to have a family, a home, and a stable life in a community with friends. With Bo, she gets none of these. Elsa is worn out from work at an early age. She must be the buffer between her husband and her sons. the one stable force that holds the family together, she sacrifices herself for the others. She succumbs to breast cancer before turning fifty.
Chester
Chester (Chet) Mason, Bo and Elsa’s older son. Chet is big and strong, like his father, and he aspires to become a major league baseball player, like his father. He is uncomfortable with Bo’s bootlegging activities. When he is only seventeen years old, he elopes with Laura Betterton, who is twenty-one, against his parents’ wishes. When the Depression hits, he loses his job and must move home. Washed up at the age of twenty-three, he dies of pneumonia.
Bruce Mason
Bruce Mason, Bo and Elsa’s younger son. Bruce is smaller than Chet and not as athletic, but he is much more gifted academically. As a small child, he clings to his mother in fear, a characteristic that makes Bo angry. Bo’s anger makes Bruce more fearful. As a boy living on a homestead in Saskatchewan, he hunts gophers passionately and admires his father’s skill with a gun, but he is more drawn to books. Deeply attached to his mother, he tries to reject his father. After graduating from high school at the age of fifteen, Bruce escapes to college and eventually to law school. the one survivor of the Mason family, he is the one who reflects on the meaning of the family experience.
Nels Norgaard
Nels Norgaard, Elsa’s father. Originally from Norway, he and his wife immigrated to Minnesota because her family disapproved of their marriage because he was beneath her social station. He was strict, not even allowing card games to be played in his house. When Elsa’s mother died, he...
(This entire section contains 684 words.)
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married a woman young enough to be his daughter.
Karl Norgaard
Karl Norgaard, Elsa’s uncle, a storekeeper in Hardanger, North Dakota. Less pious than his brother, he is friendly with all kinds of people, including bootleggers and gamblers.
Laura Betterton
Laura Betterton, Chet’s wife. She is four years older than Chet and looking for a way to escape from her parents. After Chet becomes unable to support her, she leaves him.
Characters
The central characters in The Big Rock Candy Mountain are Bo, Elsa, and their younger son, Bruce. Bo is a large, robust, and athletic man. He once played professional baseball and was a prospect for the major leagues until a knee injury cut his career short. Bo is intelligent and sociable, with a friendly demeanor that easily attracts friends. He has a sharp mind, quickly spotting deception and adapting to dangerous situations. Experienced in the ways of the world, he knows how to make money through gambling and selling illegal liquor. However, he is also insecure and haunted by a fear of failure. Initially, Elsa is charmed by him, but becomes concerned when she witnesses him punching a vagrant. Bo is ruthlessly cold when defending his interests, particularly when the vagrant was tampering with his hotel's slot machine.
Despite this, Bo's charm eventually wins Elsa over. She has fled an oppressive family environment and seeks to create her own life. With his dashing looks, handsomeness, and generosity, Bo appears to be the perfect husband to help her start anew. When Elsa discovers her family disapproves of Bo, she becomes defiant. Her relationship with Bo parallels the marriage of Oliver and Susan in Angle of Repose (1971) in a significant way. Like Susan, Elsa embodies civilization; like Oliver, Bo represents the wild, untamed man. Elsa dislikes constant relocation. She desires to settle down, establish roots, and build a community for both her and her children. However, Bo is unable to stay in one place. Constantly running afoul of the law, he subconsciously searches for a frontier where he answers only to nature, not society. His pursuit is in vain; wherever the frontier moves, society soon follows and establishes itself. By the time Bo has a family, the old West has vanished; the new West aligns more with Elsa's world than his. Elsa's longing for a peaceful, stable life clashes with Bo's craving for a frontier existence. Unlike Oliver and Susan, Bo and Elsa fail to find a compromise.
Elsa is at the heart of the conflict between Bo and Bruce. Bo tries to win her favor and, much like a schoolboy, shows off for her. He initially gains her love through his politeness and generosity. When she becomes furious over his treatment of the vagrant, he presents her with gifts of wildfowl he hunted. His hunting skills and other frontier abilities make him appear as a strong, capable man. Yet, he is inflexible and unable to adapt to a changing world. His momentary generosity is overshadowed by the distress he causes Elsa by frequently relocating her across the West.
Bruce, often seen as the weak son—a crybaby and a mamma's boy—is deeply in love with Elsa. Feeling rejected by his father, whom he perceives as harsh and unfeeling, Bruce focuses on his mother's kindness and dedicates himself entirely to her. When she becomes terminally ill and his father vanishes, Bruce feels victorious, having her all to himself. However, his father's return is challenging for him to handle. While The Big Rock Candy Mountain can be interpreted as a bildungsroman, Bruce never truly matures. Despite being sensitive and intelligent, he fails to recognize that his fixation on his mother leaves him emotionally and spiritually underdeveloped. By the conclusion of the novel, Bruce remains immature.
