Fifth Business

Author: Robertson Davies

Time/Setting: Unknown, sometime shorty before WWI

Significant Characters:

• Dunny - The main character who is named after a saint and devotes his life to finding saints. He is writing a letter to the Headmaster to explain his life and justify his existence. Dunny tells every single detail about his life, from the first snowball that hit Mrs. Dempster to an unsolved murder of a friend. Dunny is very one-dimensional and somewhat dry. 

• Mary Dempster - The wife of Amasa Dempster and mother to Paul. She is a love interest of Dunny's and he falls in love with her as the first snowball is thrown. Dunny later goes on to think that she is a Saint and claim that she has preformed miracles

• Liesal - A lover of Dunny's. She us the one to tell Dunny that he is fifth business and he needs to accept that as a fact. She is a voice of reason to Dunny, as he finally listens to someone else about what kind of man he is. 

• Diana - The first lover of Dunny's. She meets Dunny in a hospital during the war and the two hit it off right away. While in the end they do not marry, they become great and longtime friends 

• Paul - The son of the Dempsters who almost dies. 

Significant/Important Plot Points:

• Dunny is writting this long letter to a newspaper 
• A snowball is thrown at Dunny one day, hits the pregnant Mrs. Dempster and causes her to fall and go into labor; Dunny falls in love with her 
• Mrs Dempster gives birth to a son, Paul 
• Dunny grows up and goes off to war; eventually returns to town and falls in love with a nurse, Diana 
• Dunny returns home to see that Mrs. Dempster is in a bad mental state; he decides to put her in a mental assylum
• Dunny belives that Mary is a saint and becomes obsessed with her sainthood and the finding of other saints 
• Mrs. Dempster continues to go mad and begins to drift away from Dunny and the world around her
• Dunny meets a woman named Liesal; they argue, fight and then begin to talk about his life
• Liesal tells Dunny that he is Fifth Business, someone who watches the world go on all around them but doesn't make an impact on anyone's life; Dunny never agknowledges this 
• Dunny is comission to write a biography of former Mr. Dempster - now a magician
• Dunny hears of Percy's murder and is unsure of what exactly happened. He concludes that no one will ever know
• All of those Dunny has grown up with have died and he is the last one on Earth to live the remainder of his life 

Significant Quotes:

• "Falling, she burst into nervous tears, and suddenly there she was, on the ground, with her husband kneeling before her, holding her in his arms and speaking to her in terms of endearment that were strange and embarrassing to me; I had never heard married people - or any people - speak in unashamedly loving words before. I knew that I was watching a 'scene,' and my parents had always warned against scenes as very serious breaches of propriety." - Dunny

• Dunny is still very young as this happens in the novel. He doesn't fully understand the situation and can only judge on what he sees happening. When he looks on the snowball later in life and grasps what happened, he feels somewhat responsible for ducking behind Mrs. Dempster and puts the blame on himself. This shows how easily Dunny is willing to give himself up for others and what will lead him down a long path with the Dempsters.  

• "But what I knew then was that nobody--not even my mother--was to be trusted in a strange world that showed very little of itself on the surface." - Dunny

• Another quote of Dunny's judgment! Dunny doesn't seem to look on the world with an open eye and doesn't even trust his own family. He is very critical of everything and is both afraid and unafraid to state that.  

Theme:

• Don't get caught up in the race of life; take the moment to see that you are making a different both in the world and in the lives of those around you