The Westing Game Character Analysis

There was a game. The Westing Game. To find an heir. To win it all. Sixteen players. Eight teams. One winner. Who became the heir of Sam Westing. Sam Westing died, or supposedly did, and his sixteen heirs were trying to figure out who killed him, or if he was killed at all, which we found out, later in the novel was true. All of the teams had different clues, and they tried to figure out what those clues meant. In the mystery novel, The Westing Game, written by Ellen Raskin, the elements that were mysterious were: the main conflict, setting, characterization, and the technique the author gave clues to the reader.
As the reader follows the novel and reads deeper into the book, they find that the conflict is person vs. person, or the game itself, with the heirs trying to win the game. In the beginning, the heirs of Sam Westing started playing the Westing Game, and all the players, or heirs, got paired up with their partners that they would have for the rest of the game (38). With Turtle as the protagonist, she has the same predicament as all

of the other heirs, but she solves it by winning the game (205). None of the other heirs ever find out that she actually won the Westing Game. At the climax of this mystery, also the conflict being resolved, Turtle ends up winning the game, by figuring out who Sam Westing’s fourth disguise was, Julian R. Eastman (205). “It was so simple once you knew what you were looking for Sam Westing, Barney Northrup, Sandy McSouthers (west, north, south). Now she was on her way to meet Windy Windkloppel.” the author wrote.

On the first page, it was made clear where the book takes place.

Sunset Towers, the place where everything happened, set in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on Lake Michigan (1). At first, the story is set in July, the Fourth of July to be exact, and then it progresses into late fall, or early winter, because of the snowstorm that confined the tenants of Sunset Towers inside,”the tenants of Sunset Towers awoke from clue-chasing, blood-dripping dreams, bound in twisted sheets and imprisoned by fifteen-foot snowdrifts”. Sunset Towers was very important to the development of the plot. All of the tenants were living with a burglar, a bomber, and really Sam Westing himself, disguised as Sandy McSouthers of course. As you know, the conflict was the game itself, and with all of the players playing the Westing Game and living at Sunset Towers. When you think about it, Sunset Towers was really just a big game board, with the tenants as the

pieces.

Some of Ellen Raskin’s characters really came to life, and even seemed real, however, others didn’t. Ellen Raskin’s protagonist, Turtle, was one of the characters, that really came to life, and jumped out to the reader. Being the protagonist in all, Turtle was talked about a lot in the book, so that contributed to it seeming like she actually was a real person, not just a fictional character. When she was disrespectful to her mother, and talked back to her (12), as most teenagers do, it added a whole other aspect, to the character development. In the Westing Game, the author used a lot of characters, some would say too many. Madame Hoo, for instance, the reader only could conclude that she was the bomber. Not much else about her was touched in the novel. Another character that wasn’t touched on very much was Jake Wexler,