A STUDY ON CHARACTERS AND THEME IN “MEREKA MENGEJA LARANGAN MENGEMIS” A SHORT STORY BY AHMAD TOHARI

Towards to news said that begging is banned by the government, this research is important to conduct as the evidence of not wise rules was made, also in order the short is not only a short story, it must related to the fact of real life. The aims of this research are: 1) to describe types of the characters based on role and quality, 2) to describe messages conveyed the characters, 3) to describe theme felt and can concluded after identifying the characters, and messages conveyed by the characters. The researcher designs this research as qualitative descriptive. To collect the data the researcher reading and learning the short story, underlining the characters of the short story, and identifying the data related to this research. There are three steps of analyzing the data in this research. Those are data reduction, data display, and the last step is drawing conclusion. The results of this research are: 1) Found four types of characters played based on role and also four types of characters based on quality. 2) Every character conveyed messages, Gupris and her four friends are representative of survive and marginalized group, Emak is representative of bad mother, Hansip Karidun is representative of evil security forces, and Truck Drivers are representative of full of understanding people. 3) The short story is about social politic then appeared the themes “Begging is forbidden” and “The regulation should be fair”