The Tenant
59 pages • 1-hour read
Freida McFaddenThe Tenant
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Character Analysis
Blake Porter
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of sexual content, cursing, emotional abuse, and death.
Blake is the primary protagonist and point-of-view character in The Tenant. At the start of the novel, he is 32 years old and works as the Vice President of Marketing for a firm in Manhattan. However, when he is accused of giving information about the firm’s clients to a competitor, he is fired and struggles to find a new job for over two months. He is described as “handsome” by multiple characters, especially after he obsesses over working out after losing his job. He has been with his girlfriend, Krista, for two years, and they are engaged to be married at the novel’s start.
Blake’s anger is one of his most defining characteristics. Although Krista mistreats and harasses him, he reserves most of his anger for others; for example, he escalates the difficult situation with Whitney almost immediately by angrily confronting her at the diner. He is on the verge of physically harming her multiple times, having to forcibly restrain himself, and he also exhibits this behavior with others. For example, when Blake has his last confrontation with Mr. Zimmerly, he angrily throws the garbage can at him, noting, “He’s got to be close to ninety years old, and it probably would have killed him, but the can misses him by a mile and rolls onto the street beside him” (154). Then he thinks, “I didn’t want to hurt him. I haven’t completely lost my mind. But I can’t say the same about what I would do if Whitney were in front of me” (155). Moments like this emphasize Blake’s anger, creating a portrait of an unpredictable character and raising questions about whether he truly meant to miss Mr. Zimmerly, and what he could potentially do to Whitney as their conflict escalates.
Similarly, Blake is portrayed as ruthless and arrogant at multiple points in the novel. Right from the first lines, he points out that few people at work like him, defending himself by saying, “What can I say? If you want to get ahead, you have to make a few enemies” (9). Additionally, when Stacie comes into his office, he thinks, “Stacie is standing at the open door to my office, her first poised to rap on the doorframe to get my attention. And she’s got my attention. In that skirt—yes, holy crap, she has my attention” (5). Ironically, this comment comes just moments after he expresses his love and loyalty toward Krista. Blake’s objectification of women, his arrogance, and his lack of empathy permeate the novel, creating a character that even his loved ones struggle to sympathize with as his life collapses.
These negative attributes—his anger, ruthlessness, and arrogance— raise questions about his trustworthiness and further, the reliability of his narration. As he objectifies and lusts for Stacie and Whitney, reacts violently to the old man next door, and admits to his ruthlessness in the marketing world, it becomes questionable whether the events of the novel as he tells them are the truth. This, in turn, builds suspense and mystery, as well as a tone of foreboding as Blake is pushed closer and closer to his limit. With the reader unsure of what is truly capable of, it becomes a reasonable assumption that his conflict with Whitney could end in violence or even death.
As a dynamic character, Blake changes over the course of the novel. As the novel begins, Blake is solely focused on financial success, but when he loses his job, he is faced with the fact that everything he thought mattered were just The Hollow Signs of Success. As he loses everything that he thought mattered in his life—his job, his money, and his home—he begins to value his relationship with Krista and wants to rekindle the one with his father. In this way, Blake’s character emphasizes the theme of The Importance of Personal Connection. While his final moments with Krista are complicated, as he continues to support her despite what she has done, these moments also emphasize the importance of love in Blake’s life. As he decides to pack up his life, sell his brownstone, and return to Cleveland, there is hope that he will find happiness in a simpler life back home.
Krista Marshall/Whitney Cross
Krista is the other main point-of-view character in the novel and the antagonist of the story. She is Blake’s fiancée—the two have been dating for two years and engaged for two months—and manages a dry cleaner. She is described by Blake as “sexy,” with “strawberry-blond hair” in a “messy bun she always wears piled on top of her head, her black leggings fitted to her waist just right” (3). She is initially happy in her relationship with Blake, as she is in love with both the person and the life he provides for her. She notes how he is “nice” and “loyal,” while also being “successful [as] he will provide for [them], which will be nice considering [she’s] just barely scraping by” (244).
Because of the limited first-person perspective of the novel, Krista’s true identity is masked throughout the first part of the novel. Although she was born Whitney Cross, she created a new identity for herself after playing a part in her boyfriend’s death in high school. After he cheated on her, she orchestrated his downfall, causing him to get in trouble for cheating in school and lose his football scholarship. Ultimately, the novel implies that she murdered him and then made it look like he took his own life, indicating that Krista’s behavior in the narrative is not new to her but characteristic. Fifteen years before the events of the novel, she changed her name to Krista and then moved to Manhattan, where she met Blake.
Krista’s character is primarily characterized by her anger, violence, and utter lack of empathy, fueled by the injustices she faces. After she learns that Blake cheated on her, she orchestrates the destruction of his life, just as she did with her boyfriend in high school. Then, after she meets Amanda—who is using her old identity of “Whitney Cross”—she is enraged by the perceived injustice of someone taking her name. She thinks, “This news fills me with rage, even worse than when I found out Blake was cheating on me. She stole my identity. She stole my name. It wasn’t hers to take, but she took it anyway. That bitch” (266). Krista then enacts a plan of revenge, ruthlessly destroying Blake’s life and pinning it on Amanda.
Krista is a static character who does not change throughout the text, as she continues to harbor anger and hatred for both Blake and Amanda in her dying moments. As Blake confesses his love to her and tries to save her life, she rebuffs him, instead thinking: “I knew I should have stabbed Amanda one more time to make sure she was dead. I knew I should have added more tetrodotoxin to those cookies. I knew I should never have trusted Blake” (334). Her lack of remorse is a consistent feature throughout the novel and her personal history.
Despite this, Krista is rounder than an archetypal villain; although she is angry and violent to the extreme, much of this is rooted in the perceived lack of love from her mother as a child. Although she has not seen her mother in over a decade, she continues to write letters to her mother to protest that she was “wrong” about her. She believes that her mother always saw her as not “capable of being loved” and undeserving of “a happy life with a decent man” (264). When Blake cheats on Krista, her life becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: her mother thinks her unlovable; Blake is unfaithful, which Krista believes proves her mother right; then she reacts with violence, anger, and murder.
Amanda Lenhart/Whitney Cross
Amanda is the titular tenant who moves into the home of Blake and Krista under the name Whitney Cross. For much of the novel, she is referred to as Whitney; however, Krista discovers that Amanda stole her real identity because she got into debt and was being hunted by a loan shark. Because of the shifting first-person point of view structure of the novel, Amanda is only ever viewed through either Blake or Krista’s eyes, and their characterizations of her vary widely. From Blake’s perspective, she is manipulative and dangerous, as he perceives that she is the one who is intentionally destroying his life. However, when the narrative reveals that Krista is the one responsible, Amanda’s characterization shifts: She is the victim of Krista’s schemes and is not responsible for anything that happened to Blake. Amanda is a largely flat and static character, as she becomes the brunt of Blake’s revenge while being manipulated by Krista to stay in the brownstone long after she desires to leave.
However, in the final lines of the novel, it is revealed that Amanda, too, has been dishonest about her character, emphasizing the theme of The Gap Between Perception and Reality. McFadden characterizes Amanda as a sympathetic victim for much of the novel; she is harassed by Blake through no fault of her own while being used by Krista to exact revenge. She also tells Krista that she is only in trouble with the loan shark because of her debt from paying for her mother’s cancer treatment, contributing to her characterization as harmless and self-sacrificing. However, at the novel’s end, she reveals that the source of her debt is gambling. Further, she was recruited by Frank Gallo—the uncle of the high school boyfriend that Krista killed—to kill Krista in exchange for the erasure of her debts. She reveals in the final lines that she “did exactly what Frank Gallo asked,” as she willingly “stabbed Krista that night” to “sav[e] [her] own” life (344). This revelation complicates Amanda’s character, erasing her previous characterization as she is suddenly revealed to be coldhearted and manipulative, capable of murder. Ultimately, Amanda’s character emphasizes the moral complexity of all the characters in the novel. She blurs the lines between right and wrong and good and evil, subverting the expectation that there are any pure and innocent characters in the novel.
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