Chapter 4-Characterization
When we analyze characters, we realize that characters are essential to the plot of a story. Clearly a plot doesn’t happen if you don’t have characters. The way the plot develops depends on the characters in it. Whether the characters are children, adults, men, women or panda bears, the characters often drive the plot. Plot and character are interrelated. They must work together to create the story.
When we talk about characterization, we’re talking about how writers make people in the stories feel real. If you like to read Jane Austen, how does she make her characters feel real, or if you like young adult fantasies, what makes the characters real to you? It’s the way they are characterized by the author, the way the author talks about them or describes them or has them act. The author can provide physical descriptions such as how they look or what kind of accent they have, or the author can provide psychological descriptions such as what their motivations are or who they think. The way they treat other people or themselves also tells you much about them. In a work of good quality, you will picture them just as you picture people in your real life.
Characters don’t have to be human. You could talk about Moby Dick, the whale in Moby Dick. You could talk about the rabbits in Watership Down. The whole book of Watership Down is about rabbits, and so they are the characters. There’s Buck, the dog in Call of the Wild if any of you read that. Then you also can have nonliving things, like a computer, like Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation. However, when you have these non-people characters, non-human characters, they must have recognizable human characteristics. Rabbits can be the characters of a story but they’re must act like people or have human characteristics. The whale must have human emotions attributed to it. If the author just talks about a whale swimming around then, you have a science documentary. For a story, Moby Dick has to actually encompass some human characteristics. Characters aren’t always people, but they have to have humanly recognizable characteristics.
Character names are important in a story. Names sometimes give the qualities of the character. That type are called aptronyms. Quite often, you can tell a character’s nature from their name. In The Scarlet Letter, which you may read an American lit class somewhere, the bad guy’s name is Chillingworth. You know as soon as you read it we probably have a bad character here. If you ever read Pilgrim’s Progress, the people have very clear names like Christian or Evangelist that describe their role in the book, so sometimes the names give the qualities of the character or tell what the author is going to expect out of those characters by looking at their name.
It’s not always the case but sometimes withholding names or not giving names to characters emphasizes that they are stereotypical characters, characters you expect to see like the clown or the mean librarian or the mustached villain tying damsels in distress to the train tracks. The hero, the knight in shining armor, those characters are so stereotypical that if you see Prince Charming, you know what he’s like even if he doesn’t have a name. If he just rides in and he’s the knight in shining armor, they don’t have to give him the name Prince Charming. We already know him. Alternatively, the author might want to emphasize characters whose role is more important than their identity. If you did read that story “A Sorrowful Woman,” nobody was given names, only roles in the family, the child, the wife, the husband. They didn’t need specific names. That happens quite a bit when someone will just be the maid or someone will just be the principal or the teacher or some recognizable role such as that, and they’re not even given a name, so if a character is not given a name, then think seriously about what their role.
Physical descriptions certainly tell you something about a character. If the author says they have long blonde wavy hair, if they stand six foot five and 250 pounds, if we know they walk with a limp or have a squint eye, we start to picture them. That kind of thing Charles Dickens is known for. You have a clear description if someone’s beautiful or if they have some kind of a certain characteristic such as walking with a limp or using crutches, or they are bright-eyed and smile all the time. Our feelings change about them also if we hear their conversation. Their conversation tells us a lot about them. Their accent, their word choices, kind words vs. griping or grumbling.
We learn about their nature from their words and then, of course, their actions. How do they behave? Are they heroic or mean? Do they act in expected ways or unexpected ways? Are they funny? As you think about a character or write about a character, think about these types of things.
With characters, think about showing vs. telling. We often learn about the character through descriptions, Charles Dickens type writing where he will give very detailed verbal pictures. The author wanted you to see a specific picture. This type of author tells you what he wants you to see. Many people love this type of writing, including me.
If an author shows you, then they allow you to discover things for yourself, allowing the reader to discover things, learning about the character through the actions and the dialogue without a detailed description of what’s going on. The author gives little description in “The Sorrowful Woman” and the reader needs to just having to pick up on things from the actions and the dialogue. Then you created the characters for yourself in your head. Why do the characters do what they do? They need to be motivated by something. If we can see no motive for why they would do something, then their actions won’t make sense and the plot won’t make sense, so there has to be some reason for they do. Are they mad at someone, did someone betray them, are they trying to gain an advantage over someone, are they at war so they have to act in a certain way, are they a business man trying to make money so they have to act in a certain way? You must know their motives to make their actions plausible. Their actions won’t make sense if they go against their motives.
Characters are classified as dynamic or static, flat or round. Dynamic characters change and grow with their story. In “A Rose for Emily,” Emily is not dynamic, she is static. Static characters don’t change. If you read Jane Austen, if you’ve read Pride and Prejudice, you know Elizabeth is a dynamic character because she changes over the course of the story. If you think of someone like Spider-man, he’s a dynamic character. He starts in a certain way and he grows and not just physically, but he matures and so a dynamic character will change for the better or the worse. A static character will not. They remain the same person at the end of the story as when we first met them.
A flat character doesn’t have very many characteristics: for instance a maid in the story and we just need her ability to come in, do her job and leave. We don’t learn her background, we don’t learn her personality, we just need her to serve this function and then leave. Stock characters reappear in many different types of literature. The evil stepmother, the class clown, and the money-grubbing businessman are stock characters, so we don’t have to know them individually. The author can just stick them in a story and use them and the reader knows what role they play. The round characters have background and motives, and we know how they think. They have many character traits, and we need to know these things about these characters to make the story work.
A foil is a character that shows the strong points or the bad points of the characters around him, so, for instance, if you read a Sherlock Holmes book, Watson is a foil because by not being able to figure out the mystery, he shows how smart Sherlock Holmes is to figure out the mystery. Watson is a foil and a foil is the character that shows is used to show the characteristics of another character.
