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Use Of A Foil Character In Andre Debus 'Short Story Killings'

504 Words3 Pages
To be a Foil Character is defined as being purposely written to accentuate a specific quality of another character. In his short story, Killings, Andre Debus writes the protagonist, Matt, as a fifty-five year old man, aged and passive, but shown with angry undertones. However, as Dubus describes Matt’s son, Frank, he is displayed quite differently, as young and masculine. Frank, a symbol of masculinity and youth, an ideal man with much more to live for, is used as a foil character by Debus to Matt, being well past his prime, to emphasize the complexities of Matt’s grief. Readers are shown the relationship between the father and son in a scene set by Debus, where Matt notes the man masculine features of Frank. “[He] believed he could sense
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