Character has three protagonists: a father, a mother and a son. In a sense, the rest of the characters, however important they may seem, only serve to accentuate the one-dimensional graniticity of those three. This gives the storytelling a mythical air; each of the protagonists is essentially unable to communicate with the others: he is trapped in his own nature without the possibility of escape. I know of no other story whose characters are so brutally subjected to the yoke of retained information, so much so that the plot (a deaf battle between father and son where the mother, who once refused to marry, never abandons his mutism) seems to develop in a capsule of silence. The father is a monster out of the Greek tragedy; the mother, a saint of almost terrifying proportions; and the son must defeat the father who tries to destroy him (although this is not safe at the end of the story). The success of the film inspired by this novel, which won an Academy Award in 1998, proves that this 1930s drama has not lost a shred of its extraordinary power.