Yoon's characters bear their burdens lightly, whether emotional or physical.
"All the characters bear the weight of their choices," he said.
What relationship these characters bear to one another, or to the more mutable onstage personalities of the other eight performers, is unclear.
But they don't insult the reader's intelligence by claiming that these characters bear no resemblance to persons living or dead.
It is the first German play in which bürgerlich (middle-class) characters bear the full burden of a tragic fate, and it had its successful premiere at Frankfurt an der Oder in 1755.
Now comes Jamaica Kincaid with "See Now Then," her first novel in 10 years, about an ugly divorce in which the main characters bear a striking resemblance to Ms. Kincaid and to her former husband, Allen Shawn.
Some of its characters bear generic names like the Man and the Woman, and "The Quarry" begins and ends with images of men, one white and later one black, on the run from the unknown and the known.
THE HILL BACHELORS.By William Trevor.Viking; 256 pages; $22.95 and £15.99UNTOUCHED, so it seems, by the vogue for autobiographical fiction, William Trevor's main characters bear no obvious resemblance to a prize-winning but reclusive writer of 72 who grew up in County Cork and moved to England in 1953.
The physical and mental wounds that characters bear from the Korean and Vietnam Wars are in the foreground, and the Dude himself — in an exalted scene featuring Julianne Moore — tells a surprising, Zelig-like tale of sixties political activism gone to seed (partly based on the true story of a friend of the Coens').
With steady ancillary revenue from coloring books to sleeping bags to adult T-shirts, classic characters bear incredible brand value.
