I honestly can't figure out if Douglass loves her characters or hates them. The way she treats them and the way she clearly wants us to think about them seems to change from one chapter to the next. What's more, what she wants us to think about them is completely at odds with the way they behave! She misses the mark every single time!

It's really weird. She clearly goes out of her way to make Axis look like an awful, awful person who just gets worse, yet then turns around and starts blathering on about how "compassionate" and "noble" he is.