Victims of Their Will:
The Impact of Controlling Characters Control is an inevitable aspect of our everyday life. People regularly decide to exert their will over another, and the dramatic impact such actions can have makes them a fertile topic for inclusion in our works of fiction. When one encounters a character acting to control another character, one must consider the motivation for the manipulation, the effect on the character being manipulated, and the overall outcome for the story in which the manipulation takes place. To follow is a discussion of three stories in which controlling action by one or more characters has a significant impact on the objects of those actions and on the overall story being told. Grace Paley’s “Samuel” describes events surrounding four youths behaving recklessly between cars of an urban train. Several passengers on the train see this behavior as needlessly dangerous, and two take it upon themselves to try and exert control over the situation and stop the boys’ antics. A concerned woman threatens to call the authorities if the boys don’t get inside the train, and an angry man pulls the emergency brakes to put a stop to their hijinks. Ultimately, the decision to pull the brake provides the danger that makes reckless behavior fatal, and one of the boys, Samuel, falls to his death. In this case, the impulse to thrust control over a situation is precisely what turns danger to disaster. The motivations of the man and the woman who intervene appear to be different. Paley frames the woman’s motivation for acting as being out of concern by saying she “saw the boys jerk forward and backward” and that “She had her own boy at home.” (11) This leads to the conclusion that she is trying to keep the boys off the platform for their own good. The man’s motivation is a little less obvious. Paley describes him as someone “whose boyhood had been