Characterisation

To spark memories of past experiences

To hold personal significance

Language in use for analysis

reflective narrative

powers of observation and description

detail-piling

control of details

There is always a message behind the descriptions.

I would describe the mood and atmosphere that the description creates as…

The author places strong emphasis on…

Details are included that create the texture, the feel of the setting.

The author uses descriptive details to set a scene / narrates the story of…/ presents a dominant impression, or angle…/ uses precise, vivid words to describe … / reinforces the dominant impression in the conclusion

All elements contribute to the mood.

The skillful writer manipulates elements consciously to change the mood.

A huge proportion of stories are set “abroad” examining a clash of cultures.

People and places, real and imagined, are woven with such skill and confidence into the fabric of the text.

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 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. Characters 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 their feelings and thoughts), dramatic (interacted in dialogues through speeches and remarks), epic (the author describes their actions, appearance, background, life events).

There are various methods of characterisation:

· Character through appearance: characters’ appearance can reflect important aspects of personality and attitude. Description of a character’s appearance (face, figure, dress) can indicate some 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. A 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 characters’ class and life-style. In Therapy (1995) by D. Lodge the main character, Laurence Passmore, gives his self-description in an ironic and self-mocking way: “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 his 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 write 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: characters may also be revealed through their speech (both what they say and how they say it). Speech and dialogue reveal their thoughts and feelings, indicate how characters react to each other, further the plot, create a range of effects such as humour, tension, realism. Characters’ speech can also show their social and educational background. In Sheridan’s Rivals (1775) Mrs. Malaprop decks her dull chat with hard words which she does not understand: “I reprehend anything in this world, it is the use of my oracular tongue, and a nice derangement of epitaphs” (the comic character uses “reprehend”, “oracular”, “derangement”, “epitaphs” instead of “apprehend”, “vernacular”, “arrangement”, “epithets”).

· Character through comparison: characters may be given in comparison/contrast with each other. Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) was a story about two “bad boys”, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. Twain studies the psychology of his characters carefully. Tom is very romantic. His view of life comes from books about knights in the Middle Ages. Huck, however, is a real outsider. He has harder life and never sees the world in the romantic way.

· Character through psychological analysis: creation of the inner world of the characters depicting their feelings, thoughts, etc. In St Mawr (1924) D.H. Lawrence analyses the psychological contradictions of Rico, the main character: “He behaved in a most floridly elegant fashion, fascinating to the Italians. But at the same time he was canny and shrewd and sensible as any young poser could be and, on principle, good-hearted, anxious. He was anxious for his future, and anxious for his place in the world, he was poor, and suddenly wasteful in spite of all his tension of economy, and suddenly spiteful in spite of all his ingratiating efforts, and suddenly ungrateful in spite of all his burden of gratitude, and suddenly rude in spite of all his good manners, and suddenly detestable in spite of all his suave, courtier-like amiability”.

· Character through direct author’s characterisation: In Cabala (1926) Thornton Wilder gives thorough character analysis (including portrait, manners, background, character insight) through the first-person narrative: “The Princess d’Espoli was exceedingly pretty in a fragile Parisian way; her vivacious head, surmounted by a mass of sandy reddish hair, was for ever tilted above one or other of her thin pointed shoulders; her whole character lay in her sad laughing eyes and small red mouth. Her father came of the Provençal nobility, and she had spent her girlhood partly in provincial convent schools and partly climbing like a goat the mountains that surrounded her father’s castle. At eighteen she and her sister had been called in from the cliffs, dressed up stiffly and hawked like merchandise through the drawing rooms of their more influential relatives in Paris, Florence and Rome. Her sister had fallen to an automobile manufacturer and was making the good and bad weather of Lyons; Alix had marked the morose Prince d’Espoli, who had immediately sunk into a profounder misanthropy. He remained at home sunk in the last dissipations. His wife’s friends never saw or referred to him; occasionally we became aware of him, we thought, in her late arrivals, hurried departures and harassed air. She had lost two children in infancy. She had no life, save in other people’s homes. Yet the sum of her sufferings had been the production of the sweetest strain of gaiety that we shall ever see, a pure well of heartbroken frivolity. Wonderful though she was in all the scenes of social life, she certainly was at her finest at table, where she had graces and glances that the most gifted actresses would fall short of conceiving for their Millamonts and Rosalinds and Célimènes; nowhere has been such charm, such manners and such wit. She would prattle about her pets, describe a leave-taking seen by chance in a railway station, or denounce the Roman fire departments with a perfection of rendering of Yvette Guilbert, a purer perfection in that it did not suggest the theatre. She possessed the subtlest mimicry, and could sustain an endless monologue, but the charm of her gift resided in the fact that it required the collaboration of the whole company; it required the exclamations, contradictions and even concerted shouts as of a Shakespearean mob before the Princess could display her finest art. She employed an unusually pure speech, a gift that went deeper than mere aptitude for acquiring grammatical correctness in the four principal languages of Europe; its source lay in the type of her mind. Her thought proceeded complicatedly, but not without order, in long looping parenthesis, a fine network of relative clauses, invariably terminating in some graceful turn by way of climax, some sudden generalization or summary surprise”.

· Character through setting description and detail. Babbitt (1922) by Sinclair Lewis is the story of the perfect conformist who tries to revolt against the values of his surroundings. It starts with the hero rising out of his bed and going into the bathroom: “Then George F. Babbitt did a dismaying thing. He wiped his face on the guest towel! It was a pansy-embroidered trifle which always hung there to indicate that the Babbitts were in the best society. No one had ever used it. No guest had ever dared to.”

· Character through action: 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). Some writers, like Poe, prefer names for the quality of their musical sound (Eulalie, Lenore, Ulalume). Postmodernists can push the connotative significance of names in literary texts to an absurdist extreme. In Paul Auster’s Ghosts (1986) 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. Take for example The Fall of the House of Usher (1839), the best known tale by E. Poe. The setting reveals the character of the hero: a crack in the house symbolizes the relationship between the adult twins, Roderick and Madeline Usher. In The Captain’s Doll (1921) 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.

Different conceptions distinguish the following character types:

· flat types / 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)orfuzzily outlined and hard to grasp (open).

If two characters have distinctly opposing features, one serves as a foil to the other, and the contrast between them becomes more apparent.

A fictional character is positioned within a constellation of figures, which can be analysed 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, a helper or an 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 good or attuned to evil in others, optimistic/pessimistic, romantic/cynical/realistic? How much control over and awareness of the emotions, thoughts, language does the character have? How does the narrator characterise the personage through comment or through description? Does the narrator sympathise with the characters or remain 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)?

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