CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT. The major character in the novel is the narrator, who arrives in Ireland with his typewriter and minimal luggage

The major character in the novel is the narrator, who arrives in Ireland with his typewriter and minimal luggage. While the character is based on Bradbury at the time he wrote the screenplay for Moby Dick, a comparison of the narrator’s situation as described in the novel and the information available in Nolan’s biographical profile make it clear that Bradbury has felt free to fictionalize for the purpose of the story. Bradbury took his wife and daughters to Ireland in September 1953, and they stayed through April (Nolan 60). The narrator in GSWW does have a wife and family, mentioned at key points, but a great deal of the book’s narrative power comes from the fact that he is alone in Ireland, his family left across the ocean.

As with the narrators of the earlier two novels, the narrator’s name is never given: his friends and acquaintances refer to him variously as “Yank” (Heeber Finn and the regulars at the pub), or “H. G.” (John Huston’s nickname for him, from science fiction pioneer H. G. Wells), or “Willy” (his friend Nora’s nickname for him, from William Shakespeare). The issue of what people call the narrator is handled differently in this novel than in the earlier two; in the first two novels, the narrator did not seem to bear any grudges toward the friends who called him “the Crazy” or referred to him by the names of well-known science fiction writers. In this novel, however, when news comes that he has won a literary prize along with a five thousand-dollar cash prize, he is elated: “for years people have called me Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon…. But now, maybe someone will call me by my right name” (174). When he goes to tell his friends the news, however, Huston’s response is to call him by anything but his right name: “Son of Jules Verne,” “Flash Gordon’s Bastard Brother,” and “kid” (175–77) are all used rapidly, in an apparent attempt to diminish the writer’s stature.

The narrator, although married and with a family, presents himself as naive, even innocent, compared to the worldly and sophisticated Hollywood director John Huston and his circle of friends, who include both Hollywood stars and the Anglo-Irish elite who participate in fox hunts. Huston and his wife Ricki live in Courtdown House, outside Dublin, regularly travel around Europe, host friends from America, and generally live a glamorous “Hollywood” lifestyle. For a time, the narrator tries to participate in that lifestyle, togging himself out in hunting dress and taking riding lessons, but he also spends a good deal of time in the village of Kilcock at a pub owned by Heeber Finn, where he gets to know the Irishmen who are poor or working class.

A good deal of the conflict in the novel comes from the relationship between the narrator and Huston, whom he describes at times as a hero and friend and other times as a monster and beast. The love-hate relationship between the writer and the director, a young man and an older man, characterizes their relationship throughout the novel. As a character, Huston is drawn as larger than life, energetic, prone to involved practical jokes and temper tantrums, competitive, and given to strong enthusiasms. He takes an ordinary call from a friend and, within a few minutes, convinces him to fly to Ireland with his fiancée for a “Hunt Wedding.” The young writer seems to be a particularly apt victim for Huston’s pranks, and, from the start, finds himself sympathizing with the director’s wife.

Other important characters are the regulars at Heeber Finn’s pub: Heeber Finn, the pub owner; O’Gavin, a poacher; Casey, a blacksmith and automobile mechanic; Kelly, a turf accountant or bookie; Timulty, described as an art connoisseur from seeing stamps in the post office where he works; Carmichael, who runs the telephone exchange; and Mike, who drives the narrator not only on his trips between the hotel in Dublin and Courtdown House but also on his journeys to “discover” Ireland. The narrator meets Mike the first day, and Mike is the one who introduces him to Heeber’s pub.

Besides these characters, who appear at regular intervals throughout the book, other characters include the beggars of Ireland, featured in two sections, and characters from the past, who figure in the stories told at the pub: the local lord, George Bernard Shaw (featured in a story about Heeber’s pub), and a group of exotic “aliens” (gay men) who travel to Ireland just for the day to see winter. The title of the novel also establishes two nonhuman characters: Ireland and the White Whale. Ireland and the Whale as the object of the writer’s quest inhabit the writer’s imagination throughout the course of the novel.

THEMES

The theme of Green Shadows, White Whale is the creation of identity, of maturing, through the process of writing. At the beginning of the novel, the narrator is technically an adult (married, with children), but he sees himself as a young man on a quest to solve several important problems in his life. Spending time with an older, more experienced man, his great hero, the young man moves rapidly from hero worship to conflict and back again. The narrator literally writes himself into the story he is writing, and in conquering the novel Moby Dick, the narrator is also able to conquer John Huston, the Beast of his fears.

The screenplay the narrator is writing is both the basis for a major conflict with Huston and the means by which the narrator wins this conflict. Along the way, a short story the narrator writes (that is, one of Bradbury’s stories) wins him a point in the ongoing conflict. Finally, the novel is the next level of writing about the process of writing as creation: Bradbury re/creates his younger self and sees him to a new level of maturity. The overwhelming impression of these autobiographical novels is of a writer’s mind, a mind that does not experience events as fully realized until they are recollected and (re)written.

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