Despite changes in time and place, the events stay vivid and in motion because they find their roots in the eternal conflict between good and evil inside human beings. Such a conflict coexists with the existence of human beings and loses its identity only with death.
Irrespective of people’s race, background, social status, and beliefs, the conflict keeps its identity and raises the same basic questions.
This masterpiece follows some dialectic approach to turn the eternal conflict from the abstract into the material, from the invisible to the visible, from the cryptic to the clear.
Moreover, it proceeds to some excavations in the psychology of human beings and dives into the depth of the human instincts and illustrates how they shape human deeds, how they affect inner peace, and undermine the immune system of our beliefs.
Every character symbolizes a real personality and a certain way of living and refers to some psychological and mental background along with cultural roots. Each character is the product of some historical evolution in a given environment and deserves a deep study to understand how the characters in the novel behave and move, the secrets of their ambitions, and the sources of their worries.
a. BERTA: Her character stands as the memory of the village. She considers herself the guardian of the village and she finds her strength at the core of knowledge, wisdom, empathy, mental alertness and clairvoyance. She stays faithful to her husband and to the mission he bequeathed to her: protecting the village from some unexpected danger that someday will take place.
Despite her valuable repertoire, this character remains marginalized and despised and most of the villagers regard her as a witch since she utters only nonsense and absurd speech.
During the whole work, she amazingly stays pertinent, confident, and nothing shakes her faith.
b. Chantal: A simple girl who struggles to earn her living. She went through a harsh past that weighs on her present and future. She sees herself lost inside a village that doesn’t give her the real respect she deserves and keeps reminding her of the favor she has received from the inhabitants. She must stay grateful and obedient.
She stands up to the accumulation of failures she experienced and fights to keep the flame of her ambition alive. In truth, Chantal exists in all societies, and she is usually imprisoned by the cultural structures of the community and its static way of living. This dynamic character has to overcome the ordinary worries shaped by the masses (getting married early and having children …) and defy the collective conception. Her personal conception and convictions are deemed weird and immoral since they aren’t regulated or well appreciated by the local conception. She must defy the mental and psychological structures of the village inhabitants and impose her rebellious views and insights.
In the novel, her character is growing with the events of the novel. The challenge she finds herself defying makes her gradually discover her rich human repertoire. She is deemed as a helpless and poor girl from her birthday to the moment of the stranger’s coming. Yet, she proves strong and wiser and even becomes a heroine who saves the village from self-destruction.
c. The stranger: A very complicated character whose coming brings about some earthquake to the village and shakes their everyday stability. A successful man who had reached the glory of wealth and excellence and had enjoyed a successful matrimonial life until a tragedy occurred and put an end to the life of his wife and children. This tragedy forced him to review all his convictions and rethink his certainties and run the risk to find an answer to the core question in the novel: are human beings, in essence, good or evil?
He stays at the mercy of such a delicate question and the fervor of finding an answer leads him to try some experiment by making a weird offer / challenge to the villagers. He targets their basic instincts of greed, temptation, and ambition to accept his deal and free himself from the heavy burden of the question he is aching for its answer.
Though the challenge presents the stranger as a merciless monster, it unlocks the readiness of his humane side to get awakened especially during his encounter with Chantal.
The coming of this villain can be perceived as the shock that awakens the human conscience and puts its beliefs on test in order to invite people to rethink and question many convictions and certainties.
The village is controlled by a half-dozen individuals who are yearning for wealth and power.
They usually pretend serving the common good while they use the whole community in the service of their own personal interests.
He represents religion and its weight in the community. He demonstrates how religion is used to shape the way of thinking of people and their insights and impose their allegiance and obedience. The priest in the novel comes up with some interpretations that serve his brutal ambitions and turns religion from its noble mission into some soft power that aggressively shapes a submissive community by killing people’s ability to use their mind and form their own insights.
The basic economic income for the village is tourism basically the hunting activity. The landlady is the responsible for the wellbeing of tourists since she provides shelter and accommodation to tourists and owns the bar where the villagers gather in the evenings for their usual chitchat. Her opinion carries a lot of weight in the village.
He represents the political authority par excellence and he seems to be the final decision maker who decides the future of the village and controls the currents of the events.
He also symbolizes the alliance between politics and business (when politics serves the individual interests of some oligarchy) against the interests of the community.
She is the real influencer of the mayor and the hidden power that calculates his moves and participates actively in decision- making.
He is the hero who met the rogue wolf and survived. His presence is purely symbolic: bravery and force.
This small number of influencers can’t impose their power without the passiveness of the villagers who don’t care about what happens to the village. Everyone cares about their modest interests and let these influencers decide for them. They aren’t ready to scale up their ambitions or step out their comfort zone.
He owns most of the lands around the village. His power lets him veto some projects for the common good of the village and he does his best to impose other ideas that serve his own interets.
Illustrates the metamorphosis of a group of values where the ruler stands at its core and decides what kind of values must be active inside a community to assure security and a dignified life and pave the way to prosperity. The real change usually comes from the top hierarchy that has the tools to impose it and shape the future of the whole group. Ahab is a shinning symbol of a good leadership.
Viscos is a remote village on the verge of collapse. Deprived of solid economic sources that can help satisfy the needs of inhabitants and shape a bright future for young generations, the demographic trend of the population predicts its extinction. Viscos has a rich civilization that is threatened by the invasion of industry and the modern way of living.
The real riches seems to be immaterial and finds its content in values, a vivid memory, experience, knowledge, wisdom and culture. The immaterial creates the material riches and guides to its friendly rational use.
The whole world is in a continuous movement, leading us to wonder about the possibility of distinguishing the dynamic from the static. Many concepts are in motion; certainties seem to be a kind of illusions that prevent us from understanding the world and reaching some effective self-awareness and self-discovery.
This work induces us to think of some concepts such as: security, success, and glory.