37 pages • 1 hour read
Thomas SavageThe Power of the Dog
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1967A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Phil Burbank
Phil is the novel’s central character, and much of the plot explores how others respond to him. His presence looms large, even in scenes from which he is absent. Phil is a naturally gifted individual. He is educated and was an excellent student in college. He favors the kind of learning that comes from self-teaching, the best example of which is his uncanny knack for paying the banjo by ear. Phil idolizes his late mentor, Bronco Henry, for having shown him the ways of ranch life when Phil was younger, but at 40 years old, Phil will depend on nobody else for an education of any kind.
There is a well-defined structure to Phil’s life that he has created for himself. Various rituals, such as the annual castration of the bull-calves or the monthly bathing sessions at the swimming hole, guide his life. At the novel’s outset, he is irked that George does not recognize that it is the 25th anniversary of their first cattle drive. These kinds of things matter to Phil because they fit into his neatly arranged world. When Rose is introduced, he sees her as a threat to his well-defined order. Rose represents change; she also represents the feminine, a trait which Phil cannot tolerate because of his misogynistic worldview.
Phil is the novel’s Alpha male. His most defining characteristic is his ability to see weakness. The narrator says, “Just as his bare hands sensed the hidden rot at the heart of the wood, the secret weakness, so did his eyes see around and beyond and into” (66). Phil’s eagerness at seizing on these weaknesses, specifically those related to self-doubt, makes him a bully. And like most bullies, Phil’s expressions of dominance over others are a mask for his own excruciating insecurity. The harsh, cold, rough exterior Phil presents to others is really an exercise to subdue his own inner demons. Only Peter is aware of Phil’s weakness. Others do not see it. Phil displays few real virtues, and it is difficult for the reader to sympathize with him. Even as he appears to change at the end of the novel and warm up to Peter, the behavior is self-motivated. He sees in the possible relationship with Peter, and the grooming of him to be what he is not, the opportunity to inflict pain on someone else. It is not an act of kindness, and in no place in the novel does Phil show kindness for anyone else.
George Burbank
The younger brother of Phil, George is in some ways Phil’s antithesis. If Phil represents the rugged western cowboy, George represents the capitalist businessman. His function on the ranch is to operate the business rather than do the gritty work that Phil revels in. George is not a man of many words, which can be taken as a sign of his personality, but it also highlights his discomfort at being stuck in a place in his life where he feels out of place. He does not seem to fit in at the ranch, and like the ranch-hands that he hires, he implicitly understands this fact.
Unlike his brother, George is able to show compassion to others. The romance with Rose begins because George feels pity for her when she is crying after Phil mocks Peter. Rose is ultimately moved by George’s display of kindness, and she later says to him, “I’m not going to cry. But I was thinking how lucky I’ve been, to have known two kind men” (88). George’s kindness is another way in which he is the antithesis to his brother, as Phil represents cruelty. His kindness is not even compromised by Phil’s gloating, nor is it compromised when George confronts Phil. His soft-spoken demeanor and disregard for what Phil thinks of him exude a kind of confidence that keeps Phil in check.
Like his brother, George is uncomfortable in situations with which he is unfamiliar. As he is courting Rose, his conversations are awkward. He misreads her, and when he invites the governor for dinner and wants to show off Rose for the governor and his wife, he is unable to understand why she is reluctant. He fails to see why she would be embarrassed because he only sees things from his point-of-view. It does not occur to him that she is insecure about her piano skills because he thinks she is a brilliant player. However, this trait is not necessarily a total flaw. Being unconcerned with what others think enables him to successfully operate the ranch. He knows that the ranch-hands hold him in low regard, but he does not care. After he has that first encounter with Rose, the narrator says, “Suppose, he thought, if someone had found him there in the moonlight, sitting on the bank of the river where he had never been before. Well, he thought, suppose somebody did” (83). Unlike his brother, who wants everyone around him to think of him a certain way, George does not define himself solely through what others think about him.
Rose Gordon/ Burbank
Like the flower for which she is named, Rose is beautiful but fragile. Her presence amidst the harshness of the frontier west is a contrasting image. She brings color to the brown, arid landscape. Although she is fragile, she also has a quiet dignity and strength. She survives as a widow and creates a business out of the disaster that was her husband’s death by suicide. The restaurant, though not exactly glamorous, is a testament to her determination. She is a single mother, operating a restaurant herself in a frontier town: This is no small accomplishment. In this way, she, unlike Phil, is entirely self-made. She is not descended from an aristocratic legacy, and she did not inherit a multi-million-dollar enterprise.
However, when she moves onto the ranch, her resolve is tested. Immediately upon her arrival, she is met by a physical coldness in the house. Phil has let the fire in the basement die down, and the chilly welcome is a harbinger of things to come for Rose. Although she tries to make conversation with Phil, she is met with even more coldness in his reaction to her. From the very moments of her arrival, the conditions in which she finds herself become more and more harsh. Eventually she takes to drinking to soothe her pain, until it becomes a harmful habit. Sensing that she does not belong where she is, Rose’s true nature becomes stifled.
When she finally tries to confront Phil and break through the stress that overwhelms her, she suffers a crushing defeat. Phil exposes her secret, and now Rose has withered, unable to ]fully blossom again. When she sells the hides, it is one final act of defiance against the force which is destroying her. It is one final attempt at saving herself, if only as a passive aggressive form of defiance. It is also a signal to Phil that she is standing up for herself; Phil simply cannot tolerate that, and Rose knows it. She does not know where the decision to sell the hides will ultimately lead, but in some ways it does not matter because she effectively has refused to succumb to Phil’s cruelty. Through her entire decline, Rose does not abandon what she values most: kindness.
Peter Gordon
Peter is the ultimate foil for Phil. Unlike the other characters—specifically Rose, George, and Johnny Gordon—Peter has a mysterious quality to him that is hard to define. When he is a child, he sneaks off one night to the river and sits there watching the moon. When his panicked father discovers him, the narrator says, “Johnny was struck with the idea that perhaps the boy’s habitual remoteness was not the detachment of the doctor or scientist but the withdrawal of the mystic, the priest” (32). Like his father, Peter is soft-spoken, but he possesses an assurance in himself that his father does not.
As he grows up, Peter begins to understand what happened to his father and why the man was broken by his humiliating fight with Phil. In his final conversation with his father, Johnny recognizes that Peter “would never fail, would never cower before the inexorable naturalistic principle—that the weak are destroyed by the strong” (43). This foreshadows the events toward the end of the novel. Although he is odd and talks with a lisp, marking him as a target for insults and bullying, he is not weak.
Peter is a selfless and devoted character. When he arrives at the ranch, and he is openly mocked because of what he is wearing, he seems impervious to the mockery. Even Phil is impressed by this show of fortitude, and he mistakes it as a hidden masculinity that has been suppressed by Rose. But it is all a facade. Peter realizes what Phil respects, and he plays to that knowledge to gain the upper hand on Phil. Significantly, Peter’s goal in life is to become a doctor. He is intellectual and curious. Like Phil, he is to some extent self-taught and independent. When Peter devises the plot to poison Phil with anthrax, Phil is unable to see it coming until it is too late. In Peter’s victory, he shows the ultimate devotion to his mother by removing her most significant obstacle. However, his defeat of Phil is likewise a triumph of the intellect over purely physical aggression.
