47 pages • 1 hour read
Niall WilliamsTime of the Child
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Jack Troy
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of child abuse, substance use, illness, and death.
Jack is one of the novel’s main characters. In Chapters 1 and 4, the third-person narrator is limited to his point of view and describes the world according to his distinct lens. Jack is almost 60 but feels like he is 100. He lives in Faha with his eldest daughter, Ronnie, and devotes most of his time to his medical practice at Avalon House. The novel describes him as “[s]ilver-haired, grey eyed, he still [has] the handsomeness that compensate[s] for the shortness of all black-and-white film stars, but he [wakes] each morning inside a cloud of melancholy” (4). The deaths of his wife, Regina Troy, and unrequited love, Annie Mooney, have caused Jack’s sadness, as they were events that convinced him that “nothing in this life [can] burst” his heartsickness (4). Jack is well loved in Faha but has trouble opening up to others because of his protracted sadness and singular focus on work.
