Foil

Character Role Analysis

Bradley Pearson and Arnold Baffin; Christian Evandale, Priscilla Saxe, Rachel Baffin, and the Late Mrs. Baffin

We're more comfortable with calling Arnold Baffin a foil to Bradley Pearson than we are with calling him Bradley Pearson's antagonist. Whether or not Bradley really was murderously jealous of Arnold, the two men are definitely juxtaposed like Kirk and Spock throughout the novel, and so many parallels are forged between them that you could spend days and days examining them closely.

Now, throughout The Black Prince, Bradley Pearson's best-laid plans are continuously being interrupted and disturbed by the various middle-aged women who haunt his waking hours, and Bradley's frustrating relationships with those women make it clear that they are all, in some senses, aspects of one another.

This doesn't just apply to the live middle-aged women in Bradley's life: throughout the novel, Bradley's memories of his mother—and his lingering feelings of frustration toward her—shape his thoughts and actions, too. With that said, Priscilla Saxe, Rachel Baffin, and Bradley's ex-wife, Christian, do form a particularly vivid trio of interferers, and in doing so, they seem to echo the Three Fates in Greek mythology as well as the three witches in Shakespeare's Macbeth.