Wednesday, September 3, 2014

In Zilpha Keatley Snyder's novel The Egypt Game, who is Mr. Schmitt and what are his main character traits?

In Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s novel for young readers titled
The Egypt Game, Mr. Schmitt is a relatively minor character.  In
the Bantam Doubleday Dell Books edition of the novel, he is described in various ways
throughout the text.  His name is first mentioned on page 53, in connection with
“Schmitt’s Variety Store,” which he apparently owns, and the same store in mentioned
again on page 54.  On page 74, Mr. Schmitt is unattractively described as someone who
tries to get a competitor expelled from the neighborhood on a pretext, his real reason
being that the competitor


readability="5">

sold old and cheap some of the things that Mr.
Schmitt sold new and
expensive.



Schmitt, in other
words, appears here as a businessman who is unscrupulous in various
ways.


Slow service at Schmitt’s store is mentioned on page
129, and someone explains that part of the reason for such service is that Schmitt is
reluctant to pay employees decent salaries. Therefore Schmitt operates the store by
himself with the help of a cousin. Schmitt always attends to adults before attending to
any customers who are children.  Later in the book, the cousin admits to a serious crime
(see page 193), and it turns out that Schmitt himself had, on previous occasions,
provided the cousin with an alibi. Schmitt now changes his tune, however, when the
cousin confesses to aspects of the crime that only the real criminal could have known
about (page 194).


By the time we reach page 199, rumor has
it that Schmitt plans to sell out his inventory, and he is characterized by some other
characters as a hypocrite.


Schmitt appears as a character
in later works by Snyder.

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