Which do you prefer: Fred or George? One lost an ear, the other lost his life. Other than that, the Weasley twins appear identical, not just in appearance but in every other way.
I'm sure someone somewhere has conducted a study to see if J.K. made any effort to write them even slightly differently throughout the course of the seven novels. You know: does Fred have a habitual turn of phrase? does George focus more on feelings than Fred does? is one more prone to act first and ask questions later? That kind of thing.
In the novel Lord of the Flies, the twin brothers Sam and Eric are so indistinguishable that the author, William Golding, actually reduces them to a single entity which he calls "Samneric". In the play Hamlet, Rosenkranz and Guildenstern are inseparable and indistinguishable too. They're not twins but they, together, fill a single role in the play.
Are Fred and George portrayed in such a similar way that they are little more than a single character in two bodies?
Even Mrs. Weasley has trouble telling them apart. Can we?
Certainly in my incomplete Rowling-world novel, The Way Forward, which follows the lives of George Weasley, Aberforth Dumbledore and Miverva McGonagall after Voldemort's downfall, I am forced to imagine George as an independent person, dealing with the loss of his twin brother, but did Rowling make any attempt to make them different in her books?
I may just have to do some looking to figure this out.
You can find that incomplete novel, by the way, here: http://wordsby.walma.org/page59/page59.html.
No comments:
Post a Comment