50 pages • 1-hour read
The World Played Chess
A 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
Vincent Bianco
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses depictions of post-traumatic stress disorder and wartime atrocities that feature in the source text.
Vincent Bianco is one of two central characters of this novel. He drives the narrative forward through his coming-of-age story, his relationship with William Goodman, and his relationship with his son, Beau Bianco.
Vincent grows up in California, one of many children in a tight, working-class family. After graduating from high school, he gives up his dream of attending Stanford University because his family can’t afford it and takes on jobs to pay his way through community college. Even so, Vincent also has a relatively privileged life, not in terms of money, but in terms of safety. He and his friends are less than a generation away from having been drafted to serve in the Vietnam War. This alone is a privilege Vincent learns intimately and takes seriously thanks to this relationship with William Goodman. Until the summer of 1979, Vincent has fully partaken of various shenanigans with his high school friends, but he soon matures as he learns from William how valuable life is and how the luck of being alive comes with responsibilities.
As an adult, Vincent applies the lessons he learned in 1979 to the parenting of his teenage son, Beau. Vincent wants to provide Beau with the privileges of safety and security, but he must also learn to let go of control over his son’s life and how to believe in his son’s capacity for agency. Thus, Beau’s coming-of-age story furthers his father’s development as well.
Adult Vincent also struggles with dreams he’s left behind. Growing up in modest circumstances, he values the financial stability that his career as a lawyer has made possible. But this path took him away from his dreams of being a writer—dreams that receiving William Goodman’s journal in the mail revive.
William Goodman
William Goodman is the other main character in this novel. His narrative calls attention to the atrocities of the Vietnam War—both those that American soldiers committed and those that they endured—as well as the misunderstanding and mistreatment of veterans at home. At the same time, however, his is a story of redemption, which provides an important life lesson for Vincent and for the reader.
At the age of 18, William gives up his dream of being a Division 1 wrestler in college. He joins the military to serve his time in the Vietnam War, assuming that because he isn’t going to college, he would be conscripted into the war anyway. Passing various military tests with flying colors, he has the opportunity to choose his own role in the war, which is to be a photojournalist. Unbeknownst to him, no matter one’s job in Vietnam, the overriding purpose of being there is to engage in the violence and horror of war. This robs William of his youth—in an instant, he loses a comrade and faces mortality—and it also robs him of his humanity to the point that he casually murders a young Vietnamese boy. But survival itself requires dehumanization, as William also learns when he is counseled not to make friends of soldiers who might die at any moment. Emotions can get in the way of doing the job of killing—a job accompanied by the realization that at any moment he might die simply by chance, just as his fellow soldiers do, one after another. The arbitrary pointlessness of the war, as much as its deliberate destructiveness, combine in a trauma that persists long after the war is over.
Thus, 10 years after he has returned home, William still deals with undiagnosed and untreated PTSD and with the stigma that comes with it—both of which are compounded by the stigma of simply being a veteran of a war in which Americans committed atrocities. During the summer of 1979, he finds a confidant in 18-year-old Vincent, who is the same age William was when he went to war, but is too young to have been affected by it and is thus free of the judgments and prejudices that characterize William’s generation. In the absence of any formal recognition of PTSD, Vincent’s empathetic listening turns out to be therapeutic for William and leads him to seek help from the VA when it finally becomes available and begin to turn his life around.
Although William’s entry into adulthood is sudden, he can, and does, grow gradually into a better person.
Beau Bianco
Beau Bianco is Vincent’s son whose narrative provides the third coming-of-age story. Beau grows up with privileges that William and Vincent didn’t have. Vincent can provide for Beau in ways Vincent’s father couldn’t provide for him, both emotionally and financially. But Beau, like William, Vincent, and all the boys who have come before and after him, struggles with being on the cusp of adulthood. Beau grows up quickly when his best friend, Chris, is killed in a drunk-driving accident. This death forces Beau to come to terms with mortality and with forming his identity without the safety of his friendship. Beau starts to make his own decisions about what to do with his future, with the careful and committed guidance of his father. Beau’s narrative, though tertiary, helps emphasize Dugoni’s point that male adolescence is a difficult time for boys who want to be men and that they require care, compassion, and guidance through this transitional period.
Unlock analysis of every major character
Get a detailed breakdown of each character’s role, motivations, and development.
- Explore in-depth profiles for every important character
- Trace character arcs, turning points, and relationships
- Connect characters to key themes and plot points