Introduction To Prose: Elements Of Fiction - Characters (Part2)

 Character

A character is any person, personal, identity, or entity whose existence originates from a fictional work or performance. The people in a narrative are called characters. The author creates characters and presents his or her story through the actions and words of these characters. The author’s characterization, or means of developing a character so that they seem real, greatly affects one’s attitude toward individual characters and toward the story as a whole. Characters may simply be described, or they may reveal themselves through dialogue and action.

Basically in a prose fictional narrative, there are two major characters, the protagonist and the antagonist. There are other characters too. They include the minor or supporting characters. The minor or supporting characters are involved in fewer actions or incidents in the work. Their roles are just to support the major characters in propelling the plot of the story. Characters are developed through appearance, words, feelings, and reaction of others.

Characters in fiction can be conveniently classified as major and minor, static and dynamic. A major character is an important figure at the center of the story’s action or theme. The major character is sometimes called a protagonist whose conflict with an antagonist may spark the story’s conflict. Supporting the major character are one or more secondary or minor characters whose function is partly to illuminate the major characters. Minor characters are often static or unchanging: they remain the same from the beginning of a work to the end. Dynamic characters, on the other hand, exhibit some kind of change – of attitude, purpose, behavior, as the story progresses.

Characterization

 

Characterization is the process of revealing the personality of a character in a story or a means by which writers present and reveal characters – by direct description, by showing the character in action, or by the presentation of other characters who help to define each other. How these characters act, react, learn from their life-situations and how they change, constitutes the art of characterization. If a character moves us and remains in our memory, we say that the characterization is powerful. A character grows slowly with the story and as we read on we start understanding him or her. We even become one with them and participate at an emotional level with the ups and downs of their fortunes. Herein lies the success of the art of characterization.

Techniques of characterization are used in texts to enable readers to form a mental construct of a character. There are six main aspects to be considered: How is the character described, by whom is the character described, how is the characterization distributed throughout the text, how reliable is the source of information, what do we learn about a character’s inner life and in which arrangements of contrasts and correspondences is the character depicted.

The most obvious technique of characterization is when someone (in the following excerpt: the narrator) tells us explicitly what a character is like:

 

Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her. (Austen, Emma, ch.1)

A character is sometimes also characterized explicitly through a telling name, as for instance Squire Allworthy, who is a worthy gentleman in all respects, in Fielding’s Tom Jones. But we also deduce character-traits that are given implicitly through the character’s actions, other characters’ attitudes to him or her, etc.

 

Characters can be described, implicitly as well as explicitly, either by the narrator (sometimes, somewhat misleadingly, called authorial characterization) or by another character in the narrative (also called figural characterization) or even by the characters themselves (self-characterization).

 

The following gives an example for a characterization by narrator combined with the narrator’s representation of other characters’ views (see also section 2.6.4. on narrator comment for evaluative language). Explicitly, Mr. Snagsby is characterized as a shy, retiring man. It is also implied that his wife is neither shy nor retiring and that he is rather tyrannized by Mrs. Snagsby:

 

Mr and Mrs Snagsby are not only one bone and one flesh but, to the neighbours’ thinking, one voice too. That voice, appearing to proceed from Mrs Snagsby alone, is heard in Cook’s Court very often. Mr Snagsby, otherwise than as he finds expression through these dulcet tones, is rarely heard. He is a mild, bald, timid man, with a shining head, and a scrubby clump of black hair sticking out at the back. He tends to meekness and obesity. [...] He is emphatically a retiring and unassuming man. (Dickens, Bleak House, ch. 10).

A further example: Miss Clack, the poor, religious cousin in The Moonstone introduces herself (self-characterisation) to the reader in the following terms:

I am indebted to my dear parents (both now in heaven) for having had habits of order and regularity instilled into me at a very early age. In that happy bygone time, I was taught to keep my hair tidy at all hours of the day and night, and to fold up every article of my clothing carefully, in the same order, on the same chair, in the same place at the foot of the bed, before retiring to rest. An entry of the day’s events in my little diary invariably preceeded the folding up. The ‘Evening Hymn’ (repeated in bed) invariably followed the folding up. And the sweet sleep of childhood invariably followed the ‘Evening Hymn’. (Collins, Moonstone, Second Period, First narrative, ch. 1)

 

Characterization Techniques

 

 

 

by the narrator	explicit: character description or comment
	implicit: report of character’s actions and/or thought, description of outward appearance and circumstances, contrasts and correspondences
by a character	by another character	explicit: description or com-ment; simultaneously implicit self-characterization implicit: as implied by choice of expression and description of appearance and circumstances
	self-characterization	explicit: description or comment implicit: use of language or gesture, expression, attitudes unconsciously expressed, characteristic props

 

For the purposes of analysis it is essential not simply to describe a character but above all to look at a character’s function in the narrative and that usually means considering a character in relation to other characters.

 

Plot- or character-oriented narratives usually have one or more major (also main) characters and any number of minor characters. The main character, especially when there is only one, is also called protagonist. The term protagonist has the advantage that it implies no value-judgement and can include heroes or heroines (i.e. positive main characters) as well as anti-heroes and anti-heroines (i.e. negative main characters). The protagonist is the character who dominates the narrative. In some narratives the protagonist has an influential opponent, the antagonist, such as Voldemort in the Harry Potter novels, Sauron in The Lord of the Rings or Moriarty in Sherlock Holmes.

Supporting the major character are one or more secondary or minor characters whose function is partly to illuminate the major characters. Minor characters are often static or unchanging: they remain the same from the beginning of a work to the end. Dynamic characters, on the other hand, exhibit some kind of change – of attitude, purpose, behavior, as the story progresses.

Minor characters can serve as witnesses, i.e. someone reporting on the events though not directly involved thus achieving something of an objective report. This would be the case for Nick in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, where the protagonists are Gatsby and Daisy, but Nick observes the developments and acts as I-as-witness narrator.

An important function of minor characters is to serve as foil-characters. A foil is a piece of shiny metal put under gemstones to increase their brightness. A foil-character thus provides a contrast to highlight the features of the main character. Maybe the most famous example of a foil character is Watson in the Sherlock Holmes stories, whose ordinary perceptiveness serves to highlight Holmes’ genius. Another example would be the sensible and restrained Elinor and her emotional sister Marianne in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. The sisters serve as a foils for each other.

Another function of a minor character can be that of confidant, i.e. a close friend of the protagonist to whom he or she can confide in and thus disclose his or her innermost thoughts. The housekeeper in Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw for instance functions as confidant for the governess. This way the reader is always confronted with the contrast between the governess’ perceptions and visions and the housekeeper’s slightly helpless and unimaginative common sense.

Minor characters, not surprisingly, often remain mono-dimensional and/or static. This means that the narrative text presents only few or even just one characteristic of such characters (mono-dimensional) and that there is little or no development throughout the narrative (static). Such mono-dimensional characters can often be reduced to types, representatives of a single and stereotyped character category: the wicked step-mother, faithful servant, miserly old man, profligate youth, etc. Allegorical characters might be classed in this category as well (i.e. Hopeful in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress or Despair in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene) since the function of such characters is precisely to represent this one characteristic. E.M. Forster’s term flat comprises both the aspect of mono-dimensional and static. In consequence the term has been criticised as too reductive (Rimmon-Kenan 1983: 40f) since it is quite possible for a character to be multi-dimensional yet entirely static, as for example Heathcliff in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, who remains obsessed by his love for Cathy and his hatred for everyone else from early childhood to his death.

Major characters are more frequently multi-dimensional and dynamic, though not as a rule. One might argue, for instance, that Oliver in Oliver Twist is decidedly mono-dimensional (i.e. ‘good’) as well as static. A multi-dimensional (or round, as Forster calls it) character, as the word suggests, has a number of defining characteristics, sometimes conflicting ones and such characters often undergo a development throughout the narrative (dynamic). Louisa Gradgrind in Dickens’ Hard Times, for example, is both multi-dimensional and dynamic. The cold, ungraceful daughter of the fact-loving Thomas Gradgrind arouses the reader’s compassion despite these unattractive features because she evidently struggles to suppress her more affectionate and imaginative qualities. Luckily for her, her struggles prove unsuccessful and the reader witnesses her breakdown under the fact-system and her eventual breakthrough to a more balanced emotional life. The development of characters is particularly pronounced in the bildungsroman tradition (see ch. 2.9.). Classic examples are Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre or Dickens’ David Copperfield.

The flat characters are those characters who remain the same in the course of the story from the beginning to the end. Some scholars refer to them as static characters. They do not undergo significant changes during the course of a story. In the real sense they are not affected by circumstances around them and are usually very rigid in their belief. Many of them are usually tragic characters because they are prepared to pursue any goal they believe in to its (perceived) logical conclusion even at the risk of losing their lives.

A good example of a flat character is Okonkwo in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. If you have read the novel, you will notice that he is a very strict and hardworking person who has no patience with the poor and the weak. He believes in action and not words. He is a strong adherent of his tradition and is prepared to uphold it and fight anybody or institution that threatens the existence of that tradition. He therefore opposes the colonialists, refuses to see any progressive aspect of the Whiteman’s civilization and remains rigid in this belief even when others are bending to the wind of change. In the end, he takes his own life. The flat characters are very predictable because there seems not to be any change in their growth and activities.

Round characters are those characters that grow in the course of the narration. Most of the time, they grow from innocence to maturity and adapt to situations accordingly. They respond to changes in their environment and react differently to different situations. Meka in FerdinandOyono’sOld Man and the Medal is an example of round character.

Key terms: 

• character 

• explicit characterisation 

• implicit characterisation

• major character 

• minor character 

• characterisation by the narrator / authorial characterisation 

• characterisation by another character / figural characterisation

• antagonist

• self-characterisation

• witness 

• foil

• confidant

• mono-dimensional character 

• static character 

• flat character 

• multi-dimensional character 

• dynamic character 

• round character

• protagonist