A character (or fictional character) is a person in a narrative work of arts (such as a novel, play, television series or film). Derived from the ancient Greek word χαÏακτήÏ, the English word dates from the Restoration, although it became widely used after its appearance in Tom Jones in 1749. From this, the sense of "a part played by an actor" developed. Character, particularly when enacted by an actor in the theatre or cinema, involves "the illusion of being a human person." In literature, characters guide readers through their stories, helping them to understand plots and ponder themes. Since the end of the 18th century, the phrase "in character" has been used to describe an effective impersonation by an actor. Since the 19th century, the art of creating characters, as practised by actors or writers, has been called characterisation.
A character who stands as a representative of a particular class or group of people is known as a type. Types include both stock characters and those that are more fully individualised. The characters in Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler (1891) and August Strindberg's Miss Julie (1888), for example, are representative of specific positions in the social relations of class and gender, such that the conflicts between the characters reveal ideological conflicts.
The study of a character requires an analysis of its relations with all of the other characters in the work. The individual status of a character is defined through the network of oppositions (proairetic, pragmatic, linguistic, proxemic) that it forms with the other characters. The relation between characters and the action of the story shifts historically, often miming shifts in society and its ideas about human individuality, self-determination, and the social order.
Classical analysis of character
In the earliest surviving work of dramatic theory, Poetics (c. 335 BCE), the Greek philosopher Aristotle deduces that character (ethos) is one of six qualitative parts of Athenian tragedy and one of the three objects that it represents (1450a12). He understands character not to denote a fictional person, but the quality of the person acting in the story and reacting to its situations (1450a5). He defines character as "that which reveals decision, of whatever sort" (1450b8). It is possible, therefore, to have tragedies that do not contain "characters" in Aristotle's sense of the word, since character makes the ethical dispositions of those performing the action of the story clear. Aristotle argues for the primacy of plot (mythos) over character (ethos). He writes:
In the Poetics, Aristotle also introduced the influential tripartite division of characters in superior to the audience, inferior, or at the same level. In the Tractatus coislinianus (which may or may not be by Aristotle), comedy is defined as involving three types of characters: the buffoon (bômolochus), the ironist (eirôn) and the imposter or boaster (alazôn). All three are central to Aristophanes' "Old comedy."
By the time the Roman playwright Plautus wrote his plays, the use of characters to define dramatic genres was well established. His Amphitryon begins with a prologue in which the speaker Mercury claims that since the play contains kings and gods, it cannot be a comedy and must be a tragicomedy. Like a lot of Roman comedy, it is probably translated from an earlier Greek original, most commonly held to be Philemon's Long Night, or Rhinthon's Amphitryon, both now lost.
Types of characters
Round vs. flat
In his book Aspects of the novel, E. M. Forster defined two basic types of characters, their qualities, functions, and importance for the development of the novel: flat characters and round characters. Flat characters are two-dimensional, in that they are relatively uncomplicated. By contrast, round characters are complex figures with many different characteristics and undergo development, sometimes sufficiently to surprise the reader.
Dynamic vs. static
Dynamic characters are the ones who change over the course of the story, while static characters remain the same throughout.
Creation of characters
In fiction writing, authors create dynamic characters by many methods, almost always by using their imagination. Jenna Blum in The Author at Work described three ways of creating vivid characters:
- a magic character comes into the author's head and "lives there", sometimes "dictates their story" to the author.
- a borrowed character is created by taking an emblematic quality or character trait from a real person, plugging that trait into a fictional situation, and then the author uses imagination to transform the character into a unique construct.
- a made-up character is created from the "ground up", often starting from expediency as a two-dimensional creation which the author then tries to get to know better, sometimes by adding trouble and conflict.
Other
Mary Sues are characters mainly appearing in Fan Fiction. They are virtually devoid of flaws and are therefore considered flat characters.
See also
Notes
References
- [1] Paisley Livingston & Andrea Sauchelli, 'Philosophical Perspectives on Fictional Characters', New Literary History, 42, 2 (2011), pp. 337â€"60.