43 pages • 1 hour read
In Five Years
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Character Analysis
Dannie Kohan
Dannie is the protagonist of this novel. For the bulk of the narrative, Dannie is 32 years old and living in Manhattan, where she works at her dream job as a corporate lawyer. Dannie is an ambitious person whose regimented lifestyle and strict self-discipline are a result both of her nature and of the trauma of her brother’s death when she was 12 years old. As she is the narrator of the novel, Dannie’s perspective is the one through which the reader’s experience is filtered, and Dannie’s past trauma and resulting caution, ambition, and need for control inform the events, feelings, and messages in the text.
The characteristics that at least partially originated in her brother’s death shape Dannie’s values and perspective on the world. Dannie is cautious and averse to risk. The plan she has established for herself requires great discipline and sacrifice and is marked by the motivation of her ambition. She has chosen to be a corporate lawyer, preferring the fact-based and black-and-white text of contract law to the more passionate, spur-of-the moment trial law. Dannie prefers certainty to uncertainty and rarely makes decisions that aren’t informed by her goals and the outcomes she deems most likely.
Dannie’s controlling nature serves her well in these ambitions—both for the status she wants to achieve in the firm and the affluent, safe lifestyle she wants for the future. Detail-oriented, pragmatic, and hard-working, Dannie’s need for control has helped her thrive in the workplace. This has come at the cost of thriving in her personal life, something that her future-minded, rational view of the world has blinded her to.
After her premonition, Dannie is forced to deal with uncertainty as her experience calls into question the plans she has held for herself. While unsettling, the premonition and Bella’s illness open her up to life’s possibilities and to the importance of the present moment, and by the end of the novel, she is ready to embrace uncertainty.
Bella Gold
Bella is, in many ways, Dannie’s foil. Emotional where Dannie is rational, impulsive where Dannie is risk-averse, and trusting where Dannie is cautious, Bella represents to Dannie a kind of charmed life that has gone untouched by tragedy and struggle. Bella’s wealthy parents were often absent, so her seemingly carefree, nomadic nature may be grounded in the lack of a stable home environment.
Bella is artistic and very beautiful and easily draws people to her with her wit and personality. She loves easily and is easily loved, qualities that Dannie both admires and envies. Bella is frequently described as emotional and incapable of finishing tasks. As the novel progresses, the reader sees that this description is filtered through Dannie’s own values and anxieties. The reader’s experience of Bella is of a woman who cares deeply and freely for the people in her life, who appreciates people and art and travel, and who sees the world as a vast, beautiful place worthy of exploration.
Dannie strongly associates Bella with the idea of life—of living it and enjoying it. Bella is further associated with life immediately before the dramatic turn of the novel; in their belief that she is pregnant, Bella becomes a maternal figure and also the creator of miraculous life. After the turn, Bella becomes the embodied symbol of death and suffering. Her illness intensifies Dannie’s understanding of the nature and value of time; Bella can live only in the present moment, without the guarantee of future moments. It’s an immediacy that echoes earlier descriptions of the character as capricious and irresponsible but that changes the narrative around the passage of time to one in which the present moment is to be valued in and of itself.
Aaron Gregory
Aaron is Bella’s boyfriend and the man Dannie saw in her premonition. He is an architect whom Bella met on Tinder, a dating app. Most people call Aaron “Greg,” a shortening of his last name. The only person who calls him Aaron is Dannie. This point is a reinforcement of the novel’s argument that the future may be seen but not understood. Dannie thinks of him as Aaron because she looked at his driver’s license in her premonition. She assumed he would be called Aaron just as she assumed that she would be engaged to him by mid-December of 2025.
Aaron is kind and thoughtful. He loves Bella and considers her to be his soulmate, something he claims even after Bella’s cancer diagnosis. Dannie is skeptical of him at first. Her skepticism is based both in her premonition and in her perception of the types of men Bella dated before him. As the novel progresses, Aaron earns Dannie’s trust and respect. She feels able to be vulnerable with him because of her foreknowledge of their eventual intimacy. Though Aaron cannot be seen as a direct foil for David, his relationship with Bella is a foil for Dannie’s relationship with David. He and Bella are present with each other and express their deep feelings freely.
David Rosen
David, Dannie’s fiancé, is also a kind and decent man. He cares deeply for Dannie and allows her to direct the course of their relationship. This dynamic satisfies her need for control and allows her to assume that they are both happy with the state of the relationship. David is in finance and shares the same goals of affluence and status. One of David’s most defining characteristics is his patience, and he allows Dannie to get away with stalling and rescheduling their wedding repeatedly over the course of four and a half years.
This patience unfortunately allows Dannie to maintain a relationship in which neither of them confronts the problems that the long engagement suggests. Dannie remarks often that she loves David for his easygoing nature, his similar focus on their futures, and his thoughtfulness and understanding. Because Dannie doesn’t think too deeply about David’s feelings or ask him to articulate them, the reader must infer his perspective on their relationship. Ultimately it is David who confronts Dannie to end the relationship, suggesting that he had concerns long before Bella’s illness and Dannie’s odd behavior.
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