Q And His Bipolar Attitude

In "The Dinosaurs" and "The Aquatic Uncle", Q gets mad easily but is very sweet at the same time. Q is respectable towards females. He has a rather sweet and caring side towards the girl he likes. the text does not come right out and say that h feels this way but his actions speak louder than words.

“A kind of friendliness has grown up between Fern-Flower and me. Nothing too intimate.  I had never dared touch her”

This quote shows a lot about Q. It shows a portion of his sweet and caring side. It really explains his thoughts and views on how a girl should be treated. It explains how if Q is n more than friends with a girl, he will not touch her because he does not dare to. Q seems to be against that sort of thing. He explains that they are friends and things are not intimate because they are not that far in their relationship yet.

Q is very bipolar towards how he feels about his family. At one point in time, he is proud and another, he is completely ashamed of his family. He is so ashamed that he does not even want his fiancee to meet his family.

“The time had come for Lll to meet my family; and since its oldest and most authoritative member was Great-Uncle N’ba N’ga. I could not avoid a visit to him, to introduce my fiancée. but every time and opportunity occurred, I postponed it, out of embarrassment; knowing the prejudices among which she had been brought up I hadn’t yet dared to tell Lll that my great-uncle was a fish.”

There is a lot of detail in there that explains a whole lot about Q’s views. He obviously cares more about what his fiancée thinks of him rather than being proud of his family and being proud of his great-uncle. He also knows (or thinks he knows) that his fiancée and her family are prejudice towards fish. He thinks that they are not familiar with fish, and if they are, well they are not the coolest thing around. He fears that she will not like his family, which causes him to post pone all meetings between them.


Q seems very self-conscious and worried about what people have to say in a way. He feels this way and the text says it directly. However, you have to really put your all into the reading to really understand and see these factors.

“Every now and then I suspected she was remaining silent in order to embarrass me later in some spectacular way, in front of her family, or else-and, for me, this was an even worse hypothesis-she was making and effort to talk about other things only because she felt sorry for me.”

This says so much. The context contains big bold details on Q’s character. It has two major characteristics that cannot be missed. He feels that Lll wants to embarrass him in front of her family. However, even worse she might just change the subject because she feels sorry for him. Q feels like the guy in a relationship must be stronger and more powerful then a girl and he hates to feel like Lll has an advantage.  


Q is a very self conscious, sweet, and stereotypical kind of guy. He has this caring sense of humor where he loves to just have fun ad hang out. However, he also has a side where he has to be stronger than his girl is or he gets self-conscious.