3 Character

From popular fiction and drama, both classic and contemporary, we are
acquainted with many stereotyped characters. Called stock characters, they are
often known by some outstanding trait or traits: the bragging soldier of Greek and
Roman comedy, the Prince Charming of fairy tales, the mad scientist of horror
movies, the loyal sidekick of Westerns, the greedy explorer of Tarzan films, the
brilliant but alcoholic brain surgeon of medical thrillers on television. Stock char-
acters are especially convenient for writers of commercial fiction: they require
little detailed portraiture, for we already know them well. Most writers of the lit'
erary story, however, attempt to create characters who strike us not as stereotypes
but as unique individuals. Although stock characters tend to have single domi­
nant virtues and vices, characters in the finest contemporary short stories tend to
have many facets, like people we meet.
A character, then, is presumably an imagined person who inhabits a
story—although that simple definition may admit to a few exceptions. In George
Stewart’s novel Storm, the protagonist is the wind; in Richard Adams’s Watership
Down, the main characters are rabbits. But usually we recognize, in the main
characters of a story, human personalities that become familiar to us. If the story
seems “true to life,” we generally find that its characters act in a reasonably con­
sistent manner, and that the author has provided them with motivation: suffi­
cient reason to behave as they do. Should a character behave in a sudden and
unexpected way, seeming to deny what we have been told about his nature or
personality, we trust that he had a reason and that sooner or later we will discov-
er it. This is not to claim that all authors insist that their characters behave with
absolute consistency, for (as we shall see later in this chapter) some contempo­
rary stories feature characters who sometimes act without apparent reason. Nor
can we say that, in good fiction, characters never change or develop. In A
foistmas Carol, Charles Dickens tells how Ebeneezer Scrooge, a tightfisted

CHARACTER 67
 miser, reforms overnight, suddenly gives to the poor, and endeavors to assist his
clerk’s struggling family. But Dickens amply demonstrates why Scrooge had such
a change of heart: four ghostly visitors, stirring kind memories the old miser had
forgotten and also warning him of the probable consequences of his habits, pro­
vide the character (and hence the story) with adequate motivation.
To borrow the useful terms of the English novelist E. M. Forster, characters
may seem flat or round, depending on whether a writer sketches or sculptures
them. A flat character has only one outstanding trait or feature, or at most a few
distinguishing marks: for example, the familiar stock character of the mad scien­
tist, with his lust for absolute power and his crazily gleaming eyes. Flat characters,
however, need not be stock characters: in all of literature there is probably only
one Tiny Tim, though his functions in A Christmas Carol are mainly to invoke
blessings and to remind others of their Christian duties. Some writers, notably
Balzac, who peopled his many novels with hosts of characters, try to distinguish
the flat ones by giving each a single odd physical feature or mannerism—a ner­
vous twitch, a piercing gaze, an obsessive fondness for oysters. Round characters,
however, present us with more facets—that is, their authors portray them in
greater depth and in more generous detail. Such a round character may appear to
us only as he appears to the other characters in the story. If their views of him dif­
fer, we will see him from more than one side. In other stories, we enter a charac­
ter’s mind and come to know him through his own thoughts, feelings, and per­
ceptions. By the time we finish reading Katherine Mansfield’s “Miss Brill” (in
Chapter Two), we are well acquainted with the central character and find her
amply three-dimensional.
Flat characters tend to stay the same throughout a story, but round charac­
ters often change—learn or become enlightened, grow or deteriorate. In William
Faulkner’s “Bam Burning” (Chapter Five), the boy Sarty Snopes, driven to defy
his proud and violent father, becomes at the story’s end more knowing and more
! mature. (Some critics call a fixed character static; a changing one, dynamic.)
This is not to damn a flat character as an inferior work of art. In most fiction—
!■»
even the greatest—minor characters tend to be flat instead of round. Why?
IN* Rounding them would cost time and space; and so enlarged, they might only dis­
tract us from the main characters.
“A character, first of all, is the noise of his name,” according to novelist
William Gass.1 Names, chosen artfully, can indicate natures. A simple illustra­
tion is the completely virtuous Squire Allworthy, the foster father in Tom Jones
by Henry Fielding. Subtler, perhaps, is the custom of giving a character a name
that makes an allusion: a reference to some famous person, place, or thing in his­
tory, in other fiction, or in actuality. For his central characters in Moby-Dick,
Herman Melville chose names from the Old Testament, calling his tragic and
domineering Ahab after a Biblical tyrant who came to a bad end, and his wander­
ing narrator Ishmael after a Biblical outcast. Whether or not it includes an allu­
sion, a good name often reveals the character of the character. Charles Dickens, a
vigorous and richly suggestive christener, named a charming confidence man Mr.

'“Tie Concept of Character in Fiction,” in Fiction and the Figures of life (New York: Knopf, 1970).

68 CHARACTER

i
Jingle (suggesting something jingly, light, and superficially pleasant), named a
couple of shyster lawyers Dodgson and Fogg (suggesting dodging evasiveness and
foglike obfuscation), and named two heartless educators, who grimly drill their
schoolchildren in “hard facts,” Gradgind and M’Choakumchild. Henry James,
who so loved names that he kept lists of them for characters he might someday
conceive, chose for a sensitive, cultured gentleman the name of Lambert
Strether; for a down-to-earth, benevolent individual, the name of Mrs. Bread.
(But James may have wished to indicate that names cannot be identified with
people absolutely, in giving the fragile, considerate heroine of The Spoils of
Poynton the harsh sounding name of Fleda Vetch.)
Instead of a hero, many a recent novel has featured an antihero: a protago­
nist conspicuously lacking in one or more of the usual attributes of a traditional
hero (bravery, skill, idealism, sense of purpose). The antihero is an ordinary,
unglorious twentieth-century citizen, usually drawn (according to Sean
O’Faolain) as someone “groping, puzzled, cross, mocking, frustrated, and
isolated.”2 (Obviously, there are antiheroines, too.) If epic poets once drew their
heroes as decisive leaders of their people, embodying their people’s highest ideals,
antiheroes tend to be loners, without perfections, just barely able to survive.
Antiheroes lack “character,” as defined by psychologist Anthony Quinton to
mean a person’s conduct or “persistence and consistency in seeking to realize his
long-term aims.”3 A gulf separates Leopold Bloom, antihero of James Joyce’s
novel Ulysses, from the hero of the Greek Odyssey. In Homer’s epic, Ulysses wan­
ders the Mediterranean, battling monsters and overcoming enchantments. In
Joyce’s novel, Bloom wanders the littered streets of Dublin, peddling advertising
space. Mersault, the title character of Albert Camus’ novel The Stranger, is so
alienated from his own life that he is unmoved at the news of his mother’s death.
In contemporary fiction, by the way, female antiheroes abound: Ellen, for
instance, the aimlessly drifting central character of Edna O’Brien’s novel August
Is a Wicked Month.
Evidently, not only fashions in heroes but also attitudes toward human
nature have undergone change. In the eighteenth century, Scottish philosopher
David Hume argued that the nature of an individual is relatively fixed and unal­
terable. Hume mentioned, however, a few exceptions: “A person of an obliging
disposition gives a peevish answer; but he has the toothache or has not dined. A
stupid fellow discovers an obvious alacrity in his carriage; but he has met with a
sudden piece of good fortune.” For a long time after Hume, novelists and short-
story writers seem to have assumed that characters behave nearly always in a pre­
dictable fashion and that their actions ought to be consistent with their personal­
ities. Now and again, a writer differed: Jane Austen in Pride and Prejudice has her
Protagonist Elizabeth Bennet remark to the citified Mr. Darcy, who fears that life
in the country cannot be amusing, “But people themselves alter so much, that
there is something to be observed in them forever.”

5"Th Hero (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1957).

e Continuity of Persons,” Times Literary Supplement on “The Nature of Character,” 27 July 1973.

CHARACTER 69
 Many contemporary writers of fiction would deny even that people have def­
inite selves to alter. Following Sigmund Freud and other modem psychologists,
they assume that a large part of human behavior is shaped in the unconscious—
that, for instance, a person might fear horses, not because of a basically timid
nature, but because of unconscious memories of having been nearly trampled by a
horse when a child. To some writers it now appears that what Hume called a “dis­
position” (now called a “personality”) is more vulnerable to change from such
causes as age, disease, neurosis, psychic shock, or brainwashing than was once
believed. Hence, some characters in twentieth-century fiction appear to be shift­
( ing bundles of impulses. “You mustn’t look in my novel for the old stable ego of
character,” wrote D. H. Lawrence to a friend about The Rainbow; and in that
novel and other novels Lawrence demonstrated his view of individuals as bits of
one vast Life Force, spurred to act by incomprehensible passions and urges—the
“dark gods” in them. The idea of the gratuitous act, a deed without cause or
motive, is explored in Andre Gide’s novel Lafcadio’s Adventures, in which an
ordinary young man without homicidal tendencies abruptly and for no reason
pushes a stranger from a speeding train. The usual limits of character are playfully
violated by Virginia Woolf in Orlando, a novel whose protagonist, defying time,
lives right on from Elizabethan days into the present, changing in midstory from a
man into a woman. Characterization, as practiced by nineteenth-century novel­
ists, almost entirely disappears in Franz Kafka’s The Castle, whose protagonist has
no home, no family, no definite appearance—not even a name, just the initial K.
Characters are things of the past, insists the contemporary French novelist Alain
* Robbe-Grillet. Still, many writers of fiction go on portraying them.

Katherine Anne Porter

The Jilting of Granny Weatherall

Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980) was

bom in Indian Creek, Texas. Her mother
died when she was two, and Porter was
raised by a grandmother who surrounded
the growing girl with books. At sixteen,
apparently bored with her studies at an
Ursuline convent, Porter ran away from
home. Three years later, she began support­
ing herself as a news reporter in Chicago,
Denver, and Fort Worth, and sometimes as
an actress and ballad singer traveling
through the South. Sojourns in Europe and
in Mexico supplied her with matter /or some
of her finest stories. Her brilliant, sensitive
short fiction, first collected in Flowering Katherine Anne Porter

70 CHARACTER