Witness

Hesse structures Witness in five acts; Act I is primarily exposition, introducing characters, conflict, and setting, which includes the historical context for the novel. The 1920s in America were a turbulent time—the National Prohibition Act banned alcohol, leading to a rise of mobster crime and bootlegging. Women received the right to vote and showed their independence by cutting their hair and drinking alcohol in illegal bars called speakeasies. The Immigration Act limited Southern and Eastern European immigration to America, reflecting American prejudice against Eastern European Jews (like Esther) and Catholics. In this atmosphere of intolerance and fear, the Ku Klux Klan revived itself as an anti-immigrant vigilante group, and its numbers swelled dramatically across the United States.

Hesse uses indirect characterization to reveal the narrators’ personalities; the reader learns about each narrator through their words, actions, thoughts, and other characters’ descriptions. In Act I, Leonora, the protagonist, endures her classmates’ racist contempt. Her anger and hurt at her peers’ taunts evinces her sensitivity to their insults, and it reveals her awareness of racial injustice. Hesse uses fire imagery to describe Leonora’s feelings: She is “flint quick” to anger and “scorched” when Willa Pettibone tells her that the Klan will have a barbeque and burn up her and her father. Flint is a rock used to create sparks for building a fire. Leonora’s anger is a fire that “scorches” her, and it rises quickly and destructively. Merlin Van Tornhout sees Leonora’s anger firsthand in her “fuming eyes” when he opens a window to air out the classroom after her dance. He misinterprets her look, thinking that Leonora is a witch who is casting a curse on him. Merlin reveals his superstition but also his cowardice; he leaves the classroom quickly after experiencing Leonora’s furious glare.

Spouses Harvey and Viola Pettibone are the only characters who share narrative poems. Additionally, unlike all other characters, who are written from a first-person limited point of view, Harvey and Viola are written from a third-person semi-omniscient point of view. Rather than addressing an audience or delivering an internal monologue (a narrative technique that presents the thoughts passing through a character’s mind, allowing the reader to see their hidden biases), Harvey and Viola banter back and forth in dialogue. Harvey reveals his misunderstanding of the Klan when he attempts to persuade Viola that it’s nothing more than a fun club that “takes care of their women” (25), and he believes it might bring business to their store, thwarting Bronson’s neighboring store (Bronson is anti-Klan). Viola, on the other hand, demonstrates restraint and wisdom when she repeatedly tells Harvey that the Klan is dangerous and that joining the Klan will cost them their regular patrons. As the novel progresses, the couple will increasingly represent the different factions in the town who side with or against the Klan. Their arguments will mirror the attitudes of the townspeople, with Harvey siding with the Klan because he doesn’t see the harm in it (revealing his hidden biases) and Viola quietly attempting to undo the damage that Harvey does in the Klan’s name.

Constable Johnson’s first poem displays his guilt over the death of Leonora’s mother, and the poem’s use of repetition emphasizes that sense of guilt and his desire to avoid blame. He blurts, “don’t blame me. / it’s not my fault” (8), while describing the roads. He then repeats that it “wasn’t [his] fault” (8) that Wright Sutter brought his family to town. When he describes how the wagon became mired in the mud, he states, “i wasn’t even on duty / not my fault” (8), and he ends the poem with a couplet stating “don’t blame me / the roads were bad” (8). The line “the roads were bad” (8) begins and ends the poem; this bookend encloses Johnson’s excuses within a statement of fact. He is essentially scrambling for factual evidence of his innocence; if poor road conditions were the real reason for Mrs. Sutter’s death, it absolves Johnson of blame.

Johnny Reeves, the town preacher, exposes his narcissism and prejudice in four poems in Act I. Though Esther catches him preying on a young girl, he nevertheless sermonizes against the new “immorality” he sees in young women. Despite his virtuous veneer, the difference between his sermons and his actions reveals his self-righteous hypocrisy. Johnny displays his racism when he speaks out against a “colored” preacher who “can lure good white folk from their hearths” (14). Additionally, Johnny deplores the “negro problem” (16) in Harlem, stating that “negroes kill other negroes” (16), which he believes is the solution to the “problem.” Therefore, even by Act I, Johnny’s character is steeped in irony: He is a preacher, but all of his most defining qualities—hypocrisy, predation, misogyny, racism—prove how unfit he is for spiritual leadership.

Act I also introduces the main characters’ reaction to the Klan’s arrival, and these reactions will drive the plot throughout the novel. Johnny, Merlin, and Harvey side with the Klan from the beginning. Hesse portrays the three men as naïve and reactionary; they are immediately seduced by the Klan’s facade of being protectors of traditional patriotic American values, and they join the hate group without reservation. Johnny sees the Klan as a powerful group that validates his own racism; Merlin, an 18-year-old boy, sees it as a man’s group, which appeals to him as he attempts to discern the path toward his own masculinity; and Harvey sees it as a business opportunity and a route to status, a group with “good men / 100 percent American men” (24) and fringe benefits of picnics and parades.

Iris Weaver and Dr. Fitzgerald Flitt both see through the Klan from the beginning, particularly due to the Klan’s hatred of women’s independence. Viola also dislikes the Klan’s presence, and she worries about the violence that the Klan typically brings to small towns.

Reynard’s neutrality symbolizes the media’s general reaction to the Klan. At that time historically, the press steered away from printing defamatory articles about the Klan, because such articles would damage their readership and profit. Reynard is determined to keep his newspaper objective and let the Klan reveal their true purposes. Likewise, Constable Johnson’s passivity reflects the general attitude of law enforcement toward the Klan; during the 1920s, law enforcement was often corrupted by the Klan. Not only were many Klan members sheriffs, mayors, and police chiefs, but they portrayed their group as a vigilante movement against bootleggers and other lawbreakers, aligning themselves with local law enforcement and disguising their activities as justice for all Americans. Johnson’s passivity shows his awareness that his own superiors could be Klan members and that the community at large would not welcome his interference with the group.

One of the most distinctive narrative voices is Esther, whose attention to the details of the natural beauty shows her to be more spiritual than the other townspeople, even though she is the youngest of the narrators; many of Esther’s poems reflect an interest in the outdoors or in animals. However, Hesse also differentiates Esther from other characters by the pattern of her speech; her grammar is very unconventional, especially her verbal constructions, which often employ the auxiliary verb do/did: “i did ask daddy / […] but daddy did say no” (5). Among other grammatical idiosyncrasies, Esther also sometimes turns simple past tense verbs into phrases with the main verb have; for example, instead of saying that she “ran back to the house,” she says, “I had runnings back to the house” (9; emphasis added). The novel never explicitly clarifies why Esther speaks the way she does, but the effect is to underscore her childlike naiveté and her relative distance from ordinary adult logic.

Hesse’s choice of free-verse poetry (irregular in meter and rhyme) rather than prose (the ordinary, non-rhyming language of common speech) creates snapshots of incidents and characters, rather than in-depth descriptions. Each character’s perspective contrasts with others, revealing that a person’s background and hidden biases can influence their perceptions. The imagery in the poems conveys the characters’ inner thoughts rather than what they might say to others; this provides a window into each character’s true feelings and motivations, and it ultimately shows which characters—such as Sara, Reynard, or Viola—are true judges of events, and which characters—such as Johnny or Esther—are unreliable narrators due to their biases or age. Additionally, the use of short enjambed poems creates a narrative momentum, building tension and illustrating how even isolated events can snowball into a violent climax. Enjambment is a literary device in poetry when a sentence or phrase runs over from one line into the next. There is enjambment in very first line from Leonora’s first poem:

i don’t know how miss harvey

talked me into dancing in the fountain of youth (5).

The first line ends without punctuation, and it carries into the next line before the sentence is complete.