37 pages • 1 hour read
Peter HellerThe Dog Stars
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Hig
Hig, the narrator, is a former contractor who lives in an old hangar at the former Erie Airport, outside Denver, Colorado. Hig’s language is a hybrid of the commonplace and lyrical, and his use of colloquialisms paint Hig as an everyman. Throughout the novel, Hig displays deep empathy, evidenced by his trips to a group of Mennonite families affected by the blood disease that has spread after the flu. A pilot of a Cessna plane named the Beast, Hig’s relationship with nature, fishing, hunting and survivalism drive the novel. While Hig never imagines himself the type to murder, circumstances force Hig to act counter to his beliefs, in order to survive. Hig kills his wife, Melissa, upon her asking, to relieve her intense suffering from the fatal flu. It’s Hig’s love of poetry, and his longing for his former life, that suffuses the book with humanity and insight.
Bruce Bangley
Bangley is a former farmer with shoot-first-ask-questions-later, survivalist beliefs, who one day, before the novel starts, shows up with a trailer full of weapons and ammunition at the airport where Hig lives. Bangley always wears a belted sidearm, and he helps Hig construct a berm from which the two men can scope out and defend their perimeter from intruders. It’s Bangley’s encyclopedic tactical knowledge that saves Hig numerous times. Not until halfway through the novel does Bangley reveal his past life to Hig, which gives Hig the sense Bangley longed to escape from his former domesticity.
Cima
Cima is a former doctor in New York City. As a teenager, Cima earned a full scholarship to Dartmouth by writing an essay about how her high school counselor told her to write an essay about the difficulties of losing of her twin brother to a motorcycle accident, living on a western ranch, and wanting to go to the American East, to study. Along with her father, Pops, Cima lives in a nearly-hidden canyon between Erie and Grand Junction. Hig first sees Cima outside the stone house she inhabits with Pops. Cima’s husband succumbed to the flue while she was out of town, and her regret about this haunts her dreams. In the closing chapters of the novel, Cima and Hig develop an intimate relationship that becomes romantic.
Pops
A former Navy SEAL, Pops is Cima’s father, and is for Cima what Bangley is to Hig—an intelligent survivalist with a love for, and knowledge of, the outdoors. Pops knows his territory in the canyon in and out, and understands where to position himself so as to eliminate any intruders without question. He possesses a knack for blending into the environment and is not the type to not ask for something. In his sense of self-worth, Pops may become offended if someone offers help, for it suggests Pops cannot do it on his own. Pops is also humble, as evidenced by his understanding that he must remain on the ground, because the Beast will be too heavy, when Hig and Cima first takeoff from the field near the canyon. Pops is empathetic, too, as evidenced when Cima tells Pops to untie Hig, after Hig arrives in Pops and Cima’s territory.
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By Peter Heller
