Fictional character
A
fictional character is any
person who appears in a work of
fiction. More accurately, a fictional character is the person or conscious entity we imagine to exist within the world of such a work. In addition to people, characters can be
aliens,
animals,
gods or, occasionally, inanimate objects. Characters are almost always at the center of fictional texts, especially novels and plays. It is, in fact, hard to imagine a novel or play without characters, though such texts have been attempted (
James Joyce's
Finnegans Wake is one of the most famous examples). In poetry, there is almost always some sort of person present, but often only in the form of a
narrator or an imagined listener.
In various forms of
theatre, performance arts and
cinema (except for
animation and CGI movies), fictional characters are performed by
actors, dancers and singers. In animations and puppetry, they are voiced by
voice actors, though there have been several examples, particularly, in
machinima, where characters are voiced by
computer generated voices.
The process of creating and describing characters in a work of fiction is called
characterization.
The opposite of a fictional character is a
nonfictional character.
The names of fictional characters are often quite important. The conventions of naming have changed over time. In many
Restoration comedies, for example, characters are given emblematic names that sound nothing like real life names: "Sir Fidget", "Mr. Pinchwife" and "Mrs. Squeamish" are some typical examples (all from
The Country Wife by
William Wycherley).Some
18th and
19th century texts, on the other hand, represent characters' names by the use of a single letter and a long dash (this convention is also used for other proper nouns, such as place names). This has the effect of suggesting that the author had a real person in mind but omitted the full name for propriety's sake.
Les Misérables by
Victor Hugo uses this technique. A similar technique was employed by
Ian Fleming in his 20th Century
James Bond novels, where the real name for
M, if spoken in dialogue, was always written "Adm. Sir M***
Readers vary enormously in how they understand fictional characters. The most extreme ways of reading fictional characters would be to think of them exactly as real people or to think of them as purely artistic creations that have everything to do with craft and nothing to do with real life. Most styles of reading fall somewhere in between.
Here are some typical ways of reading fictional characters in literary criticism:
Character as symbol
In some readings, certain characters are understood to represent a given quality or abstraction. Rather than simply being people, these characters stand for something larger. Many characters in
Western literature have been read as Christ symbols, for example. Other characters have been read as symbolizing capitalist greed (as in
F. Scott Fitzgerald's
The Great Gatsby), the futility of fulfilling the American Dream, or quixotic romanticism (
Don Quixote). Three of the principle characters in
Lord of the Flies can be said to symbolize elements of civilization: Ralph represents the civilizing instinct; Jack represents the savage instinct; Piggy represents the rational side of human nature.
Character as representative
Another way of reading characters symbolically is to understand each character as a representative of a certain group of people. For example, Bigger Thomas of
Native Son by
Richard Wright is often seen as representative of young black men in the 1930s, doomed to a life of poverty and exploitation. Dagny Taggart and other characters from
Atlas Shrugged by
Ayn Rand are seen as representative of American's hard-nosed, hard-working class.
Many practitioners of
cultural criticism and feminist criticism focus their analysis of characters on cultural
stereotypes. In particular, they consider the ways in which authors rely on and/or work against stereotypes when they create their characters. Such critics, for example, would read
Native Son in relation to
racist stereotypes of
African American men as sexually violent (especially against white women). In reading Bigger Thomas' character, one could ask in what ways
Richard Wright relied on these stereotypes to create a violent African-American male character and in what ways he fought against it by making that character the
protagonist of the novel rather than an anonymous
villain.
Often, readings that focus on stereotypes demand that we focus our attention on seemingly unimportant characters, such as the ubiquitous
sambo characters in early cinema. Minor characters, or
stock characters, are often the focus of this kind of analysis since they tend to rely more heavily on stereotypes than more central characters.
Characters as historical or biographical references
Sometimes characters obviously represent important historical figures. For example, Nazi-hunter Yakov Liebermann in
The Boys from Brazil by
Ira Levin is often compared to real life Nazi-hunter
Simon Wiesenthal, and corrupted populist politician Willie Stark from
All the King's Men by
Robert Penn Warren is often compared to
Louisiana governor
Huey P. Long.
Other times, authors base characters on people from their own personal lives.
Glenarvon by
Lady Caroline Lamb chronicles her love affair with
Lord Byron, who is thinly disguised as the title character. Nicole, a destructive, mentally ill woman in
Tender is the Night by
F. Scott Fitzgerald, is often seen as a fictionalized version of Fitzgerald's wife Zelda.
Perhaps because so many people enjoy imagining characters as real people, many critics devote their time to seeking out real people on whom literary figures were likely based. Frequently authors base stories on themselves or their loved ones.
Character as words
Some language- or text-oriented critics emphasize that characters are nothing more than certain conventional uses of words on a page: names or even just pronouns repeated throughout a text. They refer to characters as
functions of the text. Some critics go so far as to suggest that even authors do not exist outside the texts that construct them.
Character as patient: psychoanalytic readings
Psychoanalytic criticism usually treats characters as real people possessing complex psyches. Psychoanalytic critics approach literary characters as an analyst would treat a patient, searching their dreams, past, and behavior for explanations of their fictional situations.
Alternatively, some psychoanalytic critics read characters as mirrors for the audience's psychological fears and desires. Rather than representing realistic psyches then, fictional characters offer us a way to act out psychological dramas of our own in symbolic and often
hyperbolic form. The classic example of this would be
Freud's reading of
Oedipus (and
Hamlet, for that matter) as emblematizing every child's fantasy of murdering his father to possess his mother.
This form of reading persists today in much
film criticism. The feminist critic
Laura Mulvey is considered a pioneer in the field. Her groundbreaking
1975 article, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"[
1], analyzed the role of the male viewer of conventional narrative cinema as
fetishist, using psychoanalysis "as a political weapon, demonstrating the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form." but this is not all.
Round characters vs. flat characters
Some critics distinguish between "round characters" and "flat characters" or
types. The former are made up of many personality traits and tend to be complex and both more life-like and believable, while the latter consist of only a few personality traits and tend to be simple and less believable. The protagonist (main character, sometimes known as the "hero" or the "heroine") of a traditional novel is almost always a round character; a minor, supporting character in the same novel may be a flat character. Scarlett O'Hara, of
Gone with the Wind, is a good example of a round character, whereas her servant Prissy exemplifies the flat character. Likewise, many antagonists (characters in conflict with protagonists, sometimes known as "villains") are round characters. An example of an antagonist who is a round character is
Gone with the Wind's Rhett Butler.
Experimental literature and postmodern fiction will often intentionally make use of flat characters, even for protagonists; the "round character" did not become the standard until well after the Renaissance.
A number of
stereotypical or "stock" characters have developed throughout the history of drama. Some of these characters include the country bumpkin, the con artist, and the city slicker. Often, these characters are the basis of "flat characters", though elements of stock characters can also be present in round characters as well. An entire tradition of theater, the Italian
commedia dell'arte, was based on performers improvising situations around well-known stock characters.
Postmodern fiction frequently incorporates real characters into fictional and even realistic surroundings. In film, the appearance of a real person as himself inside of a fictional story is a type of
cameo. For instance,
Woody Allen's
Annie Hall has Allen's character call in
Marshall McLuhan to resolve a disagreement. A prominent example of this approach is
Being John Malkovich, in which the actor
John Malkovich plays the actor John Malkovich (though the real actor and the character have different middle names).
In some experimental fiction, the author acts as a character within his own text. One of the earliest examples of this is
Niebla ("Fog") by
Miguel de Unamuno (1907), in which the main character visits Unamuno in his office to discuss his fate in the novel.
Paul Auster also employs this device in his novel
City of Glass (1985), which opens with the main character getting a phone call for Paul Auster. At first the main character explains that the caller has reached a wrong number, but eventually he decides to pretend to be Auster and see where it leads him. In
Immortality by
Milan Kundera, the author references himself in a storyline seemingly separate from that of his fictional characters, but at the end of the novel, Kundera meets his own characters.
With the rise of the "star" system in Hollywood, many famous actors are so familiar that it can be hard to limit our reading of their character to a single film. In some sense,
Bruce Lee is always Bruce Lee,
Woody Allen is always Woody Allen, and
Harrison Ford is always Harrison Ford; all often portray characters that are very alike, so audiences fuse the star persona with the characters they tend to play, a principle explored in the
Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle
Last Action Hero.
Some fiction and drama make constant reference to a
character who is never seen. This often becomes a sort of joke with the audience. This device is the centrepoint of one of the most unusual and original plays of the
20th century,
Samuel Beckett's
Waiting for Godot, in which Godot of the title never arrives.
Some fictional characters are referenced outside of the work from which they came, because they concisely express some
archetype or ideal. For example, both
Puck from the Shakespeare play
A Midsummer Night's Dream and
Bugs Bunny are manifestations of the
Trickster archetype, defying normal rules of behavior. Such references are a frequent shorthand in
mythology.
*
Archive of fictional things*
Fictional realm*
Grand argument*
Mary Sue
