David Watson is the narrator of Plague Year. He has long endurance, but he is still quite wimpy. David’s parents are divorced and his totem is a beaver. He is a dynamic character and he does what he has to in order to keep Kristen, his girlfriend. Until the end of the book he is not able to face adversity.

David is very good at running long distances because of his great endurance. He is tall and skinny and Molly says he is “free of excess body fat.”(pg.1) David also has really long arms and legs which would be good for basketball except that he can’t shoot baskets. David does not like full body contact sports because he is not well built. Overall I feel that David resembles a wimp.

David’s parents are divorced and he lives with his dad. His mom left his dad, when David was ten, for a lawyer. David was able to choose who he wanted to live with and he chose his father. His dad carves totems in their garage and “works part-time, seven till two, for a printer he’s known since they were both hippies twenty years ago.”(pg.13) David feels his dad is strange for the reason that he spends all of his time carving totem poles when there isn’t a booming demand for them.

David’s totem is a wolverine which stands for being strong and outgoing. His mother wanted his totem to be a beaver because she thought he would be industrious, but his father wanted his son to be strong so he carved him as a wolverine. During most of the book a beaver would have fit David better than a wolverine for the simple fact that David is not strong and outgoing. The only strength that David showed throughout most of the book was his endurance which allowed him to run for a long time. Not until the end of the book, when he fought with Nick Bruno’s gang when they were beating up Bran, did David act like a wolverine.

David is definitely a dynamic character for the simple fact that he is telling the whole story in which he was involved. Wherever there was action, David was always there. He wasn’t there to get involved, he just somehow always ended up being drawn to the action. Whenever Bran was beaten up, David saw it happen.

There wasn’t much to David’s personality. Mostly he felt the way Molly told him to feel. Since she had been his friend for such a long time, I guess this caused him to feel and do as she wanted him to do. As soon as Molly felt sorry for Bran, David felt sorry for Bran. Even though he did not make any actions which showed he felt bad for Bran, he really did inside, he just didn’t want to get involved. Molly told him that if he wanted to keep Kristen as his girlfriend he would have to get involved in some kind of sport and become a Jock. She told him this because Kristen was a cheerleader and she wouldn’t want to go out with a wimp. This is why David got involved in cross-country so he would not lose Kristen.

David did not care too much about popularity, yet he did not want to get involved with Bran because he was afraid of what everyone would think of him if he helped a serial killer’s son. With this you could say that David could not face adversity. He was too worried about what everyone else would think and the chance of losing Kristen if he got involved with Bran. Instead of facing the adversity and helping Bran prove to everyone that he was not a “Bad Seed” because of what his father had done, David just stood back and watched it all happen.