A Visual Of Character Relations in Danticat’s ‘The Dew Breaker’

For my project, I decided to undergo the creation of a chart to visualize the connections between every major character of The Dew Breaker. To do this, I first went through every chapter and made a list of every character, loosely grouped by chapter, which looked something like this:

Obviously, not all of these characters were major characters that had to be on a chart. With a full two pages of this sort of a list, that would have been far too much. So in the actual chart, I ignored any character such as “Ms. Hind’s parents” or “Patrick Dorismond” who was mentioned a single time as someone who was killed in Manhattan.

My next challenge was to actually create the chart using Lucidchart. I found out quickly that the free version limits the amount of shape you can place on a graph, so I found a way around this by constructing the graph one chapter at a time, screenshotting it, and posting the chapter’s graph as a single image onto the chart before removing the original version to make the next chapter. This means I lost a bit of quality in the definition of it, but it’s still perfectly readable.

I decided to color code repeating characters. The most of important of these is the father, who we know shows up in different chapters. Because characters are referred to differently in different chapters, the color coding was extra necessary, so it could be clear that the same person was being discussed.

I think this project is meaningful because the interconnectedness of the characters is essential to the style of the book and its storytelling, but it can be difficult to track them all. For someone like me, who benefits from having a visual, a chart like this helps me understand how characters are related to each other. I also included a bit of writing along with each character, just to give some context to their presence in the chapter, or to highlight what we learn about them in that chapter.

With all that said, here is my chart:

And in case it won’t display well, here are images of the individual chapter charts.