Characters
Literary critics often find fault with the characters in Michener’s books. Because of the type of historical panorama or saga that he presents, he sometimes doesn’t devote enough time or space needed to fully develop them. But his readers do find memorable people, including principal characters who also serve as narrators, to whom they can relate and react as the story progresses. But they are occasionally people of action and not reflection.
'I tend to accept characters more or less at face value, preferring to have them reveal themselves in their own way,' he said in The World Is My Home. 'I have tried to create men and women who capture the imagination and hold it.'
Michener said he centered his writing on 'ordinary but memorable characters whose lives shed a kind of radiance, whose behavior, good or bad, illuminated what I was striving to impart.'
He does admit in his Writer’s Handbook that 'I realize that there may have been a better approach that relied less on setting and more on character.'
Michener’s characters display courage and hard work. They possess the fortitude necessary to press on against difficulties caused by climate, terrain, wars or other people. They are willing to exert themselves to achieve goals. Harry Brubaker in The Bridges of Toko-Ri continues to fly missions over Korea because his sense of doing a job well overcomes his bitterness about leaving his family to fight in a war. Levi and Elly Zendt in Centennial push on across the plains despite the hardships of the journey. In Texas, Fray Damian de Saldana represents the devotion of Catholic missionaries, working for the Lord with humility and diligence, and Emma Larkin survives her years in captivity by Comanche Indians.
He knew that the melting pot was a primal American image, and he knew that novels about people from far-away places would appeal to the tolerant strain in Americans, no matter how submerged it sometimes was. 'I always loved people, their histories, the preposterous things they did and said, and I especially relish their stories about themselves,' he said. 'I was eager to collect information about everyone I met. I was a listener, not a talker.'
