8. Characterisation

Characters in a work of fiction are generally designed to open up or explore certain aspects of human experience; they often depict particular traits of human nature. The fictional character is influenced by literary, historical, and cultural concepts and conventions. When we think about the characters in a prose text we should consider their appearance, personality and behaviour; how the author presents them; how they fit into the development of the themes and ideas. The characters in a novel are literary constructions created by the author, and are there to contribute to the text’s ideas and purpose. Characters can be lyrical (the writer focuses on his/her feelings and thoughts), dramatic, epic (the author describes the character’s actions, appearance, setting, life events).

There are various methods of characterisation:

• Character through appearance: the character’s appearance can reflect important aspects of personality and attitude. Description of a character’s appearance (face, figure, dress) can indicate aspects of personality, social and economic status, health and well-being, illustrate change and development, show a state of mind, place the character as a specific type. The character’s portrait can be static (complete description of the appearance) or dynamic (the details are revealed throughout the whole story). Clothes are always a useful index of character, class, life-style. In Therapy by D.Lodge the main character, Laurence Passmore, gives his self-description: “I am fifty-eight years old, five feet nine-and-a-half inches tall and thirteen stone eight pounds in weight – which is two stone more than it should be according to the table in our dog-eared copy of the Family Book of Health. (…) They say that inside every fat man there’s a thin man struggling to get out, and I hear this stifled groans every time I look into the bathroom mirror. (…) My chest is covered with what looks like a doormat-sized Brillo pad that grows right up to my Adam’s apple: If I wear an open-necked shirt, wiry tendrils sprout from the top like some kind of fast-growing fungus from outer space in an old Nigel Kneale serial. And by a cruel twist of genetic fate I have practically no hair above the Adam’s apple. My pate is as bald as an electric light bulb, like my father’s, apart from a little fringe around the ears, and at the nape, which I wear very long, hanging down over my collar. It looks a bit tramp-like, but I can hardly bear to have it cut, each strand is so precious. (…) I considered growing a beard, but I was afraid it would look like a continuation of my chest. So there’s nothing to disguise the ordinariness of my face: a pink, puffy oval, creased and wrinkled like a slowly deflating balloon, with pouchy cheeks, a fleshy, slightly bulbous nose and two rather sad looking watery-blue eyes. My teeth are nothing to wrote home about, either, but they are my own, the ones you can see anyway. My neck is as thick as a tree-trunk, but my arms are rather short, making it difficult to buy shirts that fit”.

• Character through speech: the characters are also revealed through their speech, both what they say and how they say it. Speech and dialogue can reveal characters’ thoughts and feelings, indicate how characters react to each other, further the plot, create a range of effects such as humour, tension, realism.

• Character through comparison: the characters may be given in comparison/contrast with each other.

• Character through psychological analysis: creation of the inner world of the character depicting their feelings, thoughts, etc.

• Character through direct author’s characterisation

• Character through setting description

• Character through action: the actions and reactions of characters in different situations shape our view of them.

• A name can suggest an individual. Comic, satiric or didactic writers can be exuberantly inventive, or obviously allegorical, in their naming (Rebecca Sharp, Thwackum, Pilgrim); realistic novelists favour mundane names with appropriate connotations (Emma Woodhouse). Postmodernists can push the connotative significance of names in literary texts to an absurdist extreme. In Paul Auster’s Ghosts all the characters have the names of colours: “First of all there is Blue. Later there is White, and then there is Black, and before the beginning there is Brown. Brown broke him in, Brown taught him the ropes, and when Brown grew old, Blue took over. That is how it begins…”

• Character through imagery: sometimes characters are described through images and symbols which are associated with them throughout the novel. For example, in The Captain’s Doll by D.H. Lawrence the doll directs the story from beginning to end. On the first page Hannele is making the doll; on the last she burns the painting of it. The author asserts: “If woman loves you, she’ll make a doll out of you”.

Characterisation is given directly by the self-image in comparison to images by others, and indirectly by perceptions, emotions, thought, speech, and action.

Diffrent conceptions distingish the following character types:

• flat types or round characters, which remain the same (static) or develop (dynamic);

• non-psychological constructions without inner depth, psychological ones that behave plausibly, or trans-psychological ones with superior insight;

• Well-defined and potentially understandable (closed) or fuzzily outlined and hard to grasp (open).

The fictional character is positioned within a constellation of figures, which can be analised according to the social structure of the fictional world, the structure of perspectives (including concepts, values, the narrator’s focalisation), and the aesthetic structure of similarity and contrast, symmetry and asymmetry.

Fictional characters can be analysed according to their function within the action (the option to act, the refusal to take action or the realisation of the possible action, the failure or success of the action) or as individual agents (the subject or object of the action, helper or opponent of the main character).

Questions: What methods of characterisation does the author use? What meanings are suggested by the characters’ names, descriptions, their way of talking, or their actions? Is there a prototype of the character? What feelings do the characters express? Are their feelings consistent? Does the character belong to a particular character type or represent a certain idea, value, quality or attitude? What is the social status of the character, and how can you tell it from how they speak and what they speak about? What is the sensibility of the character? Is the person ironic, witty, alert to the good or attuned to evil in others, optimistic/pessimistic, romantic/cynical/realistic? How much control over and awareness of the emotions, the thoughts, the language does the character have? How does the narrator characterize the personage through comment or through description? Does the narrator sympathise with the characters or remains aloof and detached? Does the narrator employ interior monologue? With what main problem is the protagonist faced? What is the character’s position within aesthetic structure (major/minor, similar/opposed to others, flat type/round character, closed/open figure)?