The Moon and Sixpence

Charles Strickland

Strickland passes through respectable middle-class life like a man wearing someone else's coat, until one autumn he simply leaves it behind and turns up in Paris, shabby and unrepentant. He is indifferent to comfort, to hunger, to other people's suffering, and to his own paintings once they are finished; what drives him is a possession he can barely articulate and does not try to justify. His refusal to be explained is exactly what makes him magnetic, and the narrator's long attempt to fill in the gaps of his character becomes the engine of the whole book.

The Narrator

He begins as a minor literary figure invited to Mrs. Strickland's teas, useful for his connections and harmless at her table, and ends up the only person stubborn enough to keep asking questions about her husband. His own mildness — the ordinary ambitions, the social ease, the slight itch for a wilder course — makes him the perfect foil for Strickland's ruthlessness, and his confessed uncertainty about what he is seeing gives the book its unsettling honesty. He matters because the story exists only through his partial, haunted reconstruction.

Mrs. Strickland

She presides over a pleasant middle-class household, collects minor literary lions, and believes firmly that decent women live on other people's money. When Strickland leaves, her first instinct is not grief but the management of scandal — she will take him back, she says, if he comes to his senses, and she will not hear of divorce. Her serene revision of her own history, and her children's easy piety about a father they never really knew, quietly indict the very society Strickland fled.

Dirk Stroeve

Stroeve is the butt of every studio joke in Montmartre, a man who lends money to the friends who mock him and weeps over stories he knows are invented. Yet his judgment of painting is almost infallible, and he is the first person to insist that Strickland is a great artist when everyone else sees only a brute. His devotion to a man who despises him, and his helpless love for a wife who does not love him back, turn his kindness into the instrument of his own ruin.

Blanche Stroeve

She keeps Dirk's studio, sews by the stove, and offers the narrator nothing but a guarded civility that he cannot read. When Strickland enters their household, first as a patient and then as something else, she makes a choice that astonishes everyone who thought they knew her, and her self-command becomes more frightening than any outburst. Her silence and her final refusal to be rescued are what make her, in the narrator's reluctant admission, a tragedy rather than a scandal.

Ata

Ata comes to Strickland in the islands the way the islands themselves do — without argument, without expectation, offering a hut, a garden, and a child. She asks nothing of him that he cannot give, and he gives her nothing but his presence, which is apparently enough. Her fidelity, and the terrible promise she keeps when he is dying, place her at the moral center of the book's final movement, where Strickland's contempt for the world meets a love that does not need to be returned.