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Saturday, March 11, 2006

Fictional Characters who are Disabled

I'm reading the book "Folk of the Fringe" about a post apocolyptic world where the landscape has changed and the people who are left are struggling in whatever way they can to rebuild. There is a disabled school teacher in this story who is very compelling:

Carpenter entered all his lectures and stored them in memory, so that he could sit still as ice in his chair, making eye contact with each student in turn daring them to be inattentive. There were advantages in letting a machine speak for him; he learned many years ago that it frightened people to have a mechanical voice speak his words, while his lips were motionless. It was monstruous, it made him seem dangerous and strange. Which he far preferred to the way he looked, weak as a worm, his skinny, twisted, palsied body rigid in his chair; his body looked strange, but pathetic. Only when the synthesizer spoke his acid words did he earn respect from the people who always, always looked downward at him.


Good stuff.

Other disabled characters that I find compelling are:
Professor Charles Xavier, as played by Patrick Stewart in the X-Men Movies. I never read the comics.
Lieutenant Dan from Forrest Gump.
Ironside

I'm sure there are more, but I'm drawing a blank. I wonder if that is because there are so many compelling real PWDs that I admire.

Another list

1Comments:

  • At March 12, 2006 11:01 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    Orson Scott Card and Alan Dean Foster are authors who frequently feature disabled (or shall we call them "differently abled) characters in a variety of ways, showcasing their strengths, and weakness, as no different from the rest. They bring out the humanity in their characters, which just makes fans like me thrive on their books.

     

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