Character (arts)

In the arts, character refers to a fictional personality and is one of the four main aspects of a fictional work, the other three being plot, setting, and theme. Some theater critics have asserted that characters are not people but rather a collection of physical and psychological attributes that actors brings to life in order to create a personality. On the other hand, some writers insist that a well-developed character is a human being in every sense but the physical. Indeed, some ancient manuscripts on rhetoric use the word "character" for both real and fictional individuals.

Writers draw upon several techniques to illustrate and develop a character. In fiction, the interior monologue grants the reader access to a character’s thoughts. Both drama and fiction use internal and external dialogue to reveal to the audience the kind of person a character is, although the former is often more revealing than the latter. Film and drama disclose character through posture, gesture, movement, voice, and costume.

Background

Sometimes the narrator, the person relating a story to an audience, is a character within the story, which provides immediacy and immersion for the audience or reader in the use of first-person dialogue. A well-known example is Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), which begins with the first-person monologue "Call me Ishmael." Part of how the audience comes to know and have insight into the narrator is through the way he or she relates the story, such as through word choice. In first-person tales, however, the narrator often acts as a filter for the information of the story. As such, the characterization of others may be biased by the narrator’s point of view.

Characterization may be direct or indirect, internal or external. For example, a writer might reveal character in a direct way by stating a specific trait, "Jennifer had an obsessive personality." On the other hand, a trait can be shown by the character’s actions: "Before she left her apartment for work in the morning, Jennifer closed the curtains, wiped all the light switches clean, and checked the faucets in the kitchen and the bathroom to make sure they weren’t dripping." It is generally considered more effective to utilize indirect characterization in order to allow the audience or reader to interpret a character based on his or her own experiences and emotions.

Internal characteristics relate to how people know themselves through their thoughts and feelings. External characteristics are how other people know a person through the lens of societal customs and expectations. One’s age, gender, ethnic and cultural background, family values, religious belief and customs, education, interest, and profession all affect how a character is interpreted and viewed.

Characters can also be used to personify and embody a general character trait. For example, Scrooge in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843) personifies miserliness. In the novel Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) by Thomas Pynchon, the character Tyrone Slothrop embodies entropy, a concept used in both physics and information theory. In the latter, it is a measure of the unpredictable nature of information and how it is transmitted. It is a marker of deterioration and decline. In physics, entropy is the amount of energy in a closed system that is unavailable for work. It can also be used to describe the tendency of a system to disintegrate or otherwise display randomness. While the name "Scrooge" has over time become synonymous with miserly behavior, the name "Tyrone" is an anagram for "entropy." (An anagram is a rearranging of letters to produce a new word.) Pynchon employs the literary technique of nomenclature with the character’s last name, "Slothrop." A sloth is a mammal that represents spiritual or physical laziness.

Overview

Character-based forms of criticism are noted for their psychological aspect, although mythological or archetypical criticism also draws heavily on the characters of stories. The hero has become one of the most recognizable character types, and the hero’s journey as exemplified in epic narratives such as the Odyssey (ca. 725 BCE; English translation, 1614) and Beowulf (ca. 1000) has become a central part of archetypical criticism. It consists of a list of traits and events the hero displays and navigates (or develops and invokes), and it has been distilled from a comparison of many different stories in times and places far removed from one another.

Sigmund Freud turned to literature to elaborate his theory of the unconscious, utilizing the main character of Sophocles’s play Oedipus Rex (ca. 429 BCE; English translation, 1715) to describe a set of unconscious emotions he believed all boys experience. Freud surmised that such enduring works of art necessarily communicate universality about the human psyche. Subsequently, he founded psychoanalysis, which brings patients in touch with the unconscious source of their mental suffering. Although its popularity among mental health professionals has diminished, being aware of one’s subconscious remains an important vehicle in literary and film criticism, especially when exploring character motivation and behavior. Reader-response criticism, for example, is based on what a reader brings to the experience and the ways in which one’s past and one’s present integrate themselves into one’s interpretation of character.

Bibliography

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Bruch, Debra. "Character Analysis." Apollo’s Voice 9.5 (2002): 6–8. Print.

Cardullo, Bert. "Film as the Characterization of Space: Notes, Mostly on ‘L’avventura’ and ‘La Notte.’" Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 91.3 (2008): 319–33. Print.

De Temmerman, Koen. "Ancient Rhetoric as a Hermeneutical Tool for the Analysis of Characterization in Narrative Literature." Rhetorica 28.1 (2010): 23–51. Print.

Eagleton, Terry. How to Read Literature. New Haven: Yale UP, 2013. Print.

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