Main Characters

The main characters are Douglas Spaulding, aged twelve, and his extended family (father, mother, brother Tom, grandparents, and great grandmother); Doug’s best friends (John Huff and Charlie Woodman); the boarders, especially Bill Forrester; and assorted townspeople. The townspeople are businessmen, neighbors, and friends of the family: Mr. Sanderson sells Doug his new pair of tennis shoes; Leo Auffman, the town jeweler, is asked by Doug to make a Happiness Machine. Two extremely old characters, Mrs. Bentley (ninety-five), and Colonel Freeleigh (one hundred), have important relationships with Doug, Tom, and the other children. Doug is fond of riding with Miss Fern and Miss Roberta in their Green Machine, an electric car. Elmira Brown, wife of the postman, involves Tom when she accuses Clara Goodwater of being a witch. Miss Lavinia Nebbs returns from the movies one night to confront and kill the man who might be the Lonely One, what would now be called a serial killer, who has been killing women. Mr. Jonas, the town junkman, saves Doug when he nearly dies of heat and sadness.

A number of the townspeople change because of events in the novel, and these changes parallel Doug’s experiences. The other characters deal with the problems of how to achieve happiness in life, how to deal with age and change, and how to face death. Doug also faces these problems throughout the novel. At the beginning of the novel, he becomes aware, conscious, of being alive. Later, because of the events of the summer, including his best friend’s leaving town and his great grandmother’s death, Doug also comes to the conscious realization that someday he will die. This crisis of existence is the sign of Doug’s maturity, his movement into adulthood, his awareness of perfect life slipping away.

Doug details this change by writing about it. As he explains to Tom, showing him a pad of paper and a brand new Ticonderoga pencil, Doug has set up two lists: the first one is titled “RITES AND CEREMONIES,” the second one “DISCOVERIES AND REVELATIONS,” or maybe “ILLUMINATIONS” or “INTUITIONS” (27). The first list is for what they do every summer, the rituals. The second list is for new events, in part, new ideas about what they do all the time. An example of the new things is Doug’s “finding out maybe that Grandpa or Dad don’t know everything in the world” (26). In fact, Doug’s “power” to create and shut down summer 1928, described at the beginning and end of the novel, is not really magic. This power is the power a writer has, a profound doubling emphasizing that Douglas Spaulding is a character based on Ray Bradbury not only in the details of his life, but in his role as writer.

Two other characters are important to the novel, although they are not described in detail: The Lonely One, who has killed three women, and more abstractly, Death, the real antagonist in the novel. The Lonely One is perceived by the characters as a monster. When Miss Lavinia Nebbs kills an intruder in her house, Doug, Tom, and Charlie are quite sure that the short, bald, fat man is not The Lonely One, who in their imaginations is a tall, pale, and skinny figure who still haunts the Ravine. In the abstract, both Tom and Doug fear death, but Tom, despite one episode of fear when he and his mother go to the Ravine to find Doug, has not really accepted the possibility of his own death as Doug has.

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