The Characters
(Masterpieces of American Fiction)
Jack Winesap and Sven Agaard are, in some ways, stock characters who represent philosophical positions in an ongoing debate about language as art and entertainment versus language as a guide to the truth. As is usually the case with Gardner’s fictions, however, both are also fully realized, individual human beings who have specific characters and desires. In the case of Winesap, the overriding drive is to be liked and accepted; for Agaard, to be recognized as an accomplished and honest scholar. Freddy Agaard can be seen as a synthesis of them, becoming in his writings the historian as creator, the artist who transmutes the dry facts of the archives into a re-creation of actual human beings. As an artist, he is also in some ways a “monster,” an individual set apart from the normal run of humanity. “Monster,” both in its strict linguistic derivation and as Gardner uses it, does not necessarily connote a sense of horror or fear but simply someone set apart by a special gift or talent to “show forth” or reveal something essential to human existence. It is in this sense that Freddy Agaard is a monster, and “King Gustav and the Devil” is his finest product of showing forth, or illustrating, the facts of the human condition. Within the confines of that book, Gustav Eriksson Vasa, the first king of Sweden, is a man torn between idealism and realism. Determined to create an independent nation with a monarchy that will serve his people, he finds that he must...
(The entire section is 476 words.)