Character Clues
Character Analysis
Speech and Dialogue
A lot of what we learn about the characters and what they think comes from the characters' own mouths. Case in point: When the young girl and the older man are dancing, the young girl offers her own insight into why the older man might be so into his visitors: "'You must be desperate or something" (96). Even though the girl is apparently into her little dirty dance with the older man, she seems to think that he would have to be desperate to be into it. This might tell us more about her than him, right? In any case, we get some intel on what might be motivating the characters from the dialogue here.
Thoughts and Opinions
We also learn about what makes characters tick through the thoughts and opinions of other characters. For example, the only hint we get that the young couple might not be super nice comes from the narrator's description of how the older man views them:
He looked at them as they sat at the table. In the lamplight, there was something about their faces. It was nice or it was nasty. There was no telling. (68)
The narrator doesn't say much, but this brief little peek into the older man's opinion of the young couple tells us that this couple may not be the sweetest kids. Or at least, they're sweetness isn't a sure thing.
Sex and Love
We can also glean some little hints about characters from the story's references to love and sexytimes. From the get-go, we know that the older man is in the middle of some big love crisis since he's cleaned out the house that he previously shared with a female companion of some significance:
In the kitchen, he poured another drink and looked at the bedroom suite in his front yard. The mattress was stripped and the candy-striped sheets lay beside two pillows on the chiffonier. Except for that, things looked much the way they had in the bedroom — nightstand and reading lamp on his side of the bed, nightstand and reading lamp on her side.
His side, her side.
He considered this as he sipped the whiskey. (1-3)
In this brief introduction, we actually learn a lot about the dude. It seems like he's cleaning out his house in the wake of a big loss, but there's still some part of him that seems to feel attached—after all, why else would he recreate his bedroom layout out on the lawn? If he really just wanted to get rid of the stuff, he could have just left it sitting out unarranged, so that he hasn't suggests that something else is going on with him emotionally. And in this way, the older man's love life tells us a bit about where his head is.