5 Chapter 5: Analyzing Characterization

Chapter 5: Analyzing Characterization

Let’s begin with a pretty obvious point: a character is not a person. We sometimes can lose ourselves in characters, identify with characters, and feel like we know characters when they are drawn particularly well, but a character is always a construct of language, an effect of words on a page. A character is a fictional rendering of an individual (usually a human being, but robots, animals, and supernatural creatures can also be characters) who engages in activities that make up part of the plot of a narrative. Characterization is the process by which characters are developed over the course of a narrative.

In analyzing  for characterization, we can’t just give our impressions of what defines a character (such as “this is a selfless, heroic character” or “this is a psychologically divided, traumatized character”), we have to “show our work” in breaking down how the character has been constituted in this way and to what ends: what details paint this character as traumatized and what does the character then say or show about the nature of trauma?

So what are the various techniques that works of fiction use to create senses of character?

• Actions: As in the old cliché “actions speak louder than words,” what characters do are one of the principle things that define them. Does a character’s actions show that they are ambitious? Avaricious? Selfless? Keep in mind that what characters do may clash with what they say–the narrator in Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” talks about what a circumspect individual he is on one page, then proceeds to snoop around in an employee’s desk the next page, showing that he (and perhaps the capitalist world he stands for) is a hypocrite.
• Names: Names can say a lot about a character. They can indicate their ethnic, regional, national, and/or religious background. They may allude to a figure from literature, history, or some religious tradition (see chapter 9 on allusion), in which case we are being asked to see in this character either some attribute(s) or quality from the figure being alluded to or their antithesis (this would be what we call an ironic usage of allusion). For instance, a character named Napoleon might have the strategic brilliance or the psychological overcompensation for physical lack of the historical Napoleon. Or this character, in an ironic naming, might be totally at ease with themself and totally lacking in grand strategizing or vision. Names generally mean something in their language of origin, which is certainly worth looking up to get a better grasp of character. For example, my given name Michael means “who is like God?” (with the implication being no one is) in ancient Hebrew and my surname, Walonen, means “little light” in Finnish. If I were a fictional character, you would be compelled to ask if that less-than-deific meaning of my given name is the most important meaning being played off of in the makeup of my character, or perhaps the allusion to the biblical archangel. And my last name could be taken to mean that my character is good, illuminating, but not grandiosely so, or that the light I cast is fairly insignificant—because names can be symbolic in their meaning, that is, they can represent ideas.
• Dialogue: Dialogue is the representation of character speech. What characters say can show us profound things about their beliefs, motivations, and temperament. But language, fraught with social prejudices as it is, can also show us things about someone’s socio-economic status, their regional or national origins, their level of formal education, and so forth as well. For example, at one point the narrator’s stepfather in George Saunders’s story “Sea Oak” says, “It’s the freaking American way-you start out in a dangerous craphole and work hard so you can someday move up to a somewhat less dangerous craphole. And finally maybe you get a mansion. But at this rate you ain’t even gonna make it to the somewhat less dangerous craphole.” From the patterns of language here we can infer that the character is brusque, lacking in refinement, and probably not very formally educated. While he espouses fairly conventional ideas regarding the American Dram here, these facts should dissuade us from taking what he says as necessarily an accurate statement about the world.
• Physical appearance: We know from science that the way we look is a fluke of heredity, but in the 19th century and beforehand, people believed that there were basic corollaries between one’s inner and outer nature—if you had “noble” facial features, you were noble on the inside; physical shortness could be seen as representing moral smallness. You may see this in the modes of characterization of older works of fiction. But beyond this, appearance can tell us a lot about a character—their disability status or ethnicity, perhaps some of the things they’ve gone through in life (a missing limb, or more prosaically, going through life as a short vs. a tall person). Their clothing can tell us things like their socio-economic status and what cultures or subcultures they belong to. And their character psychology might be reflected in their appearance in some way, like if they habitually slouch or if they have undergone some form of plastic surgery or other bodily modification.
• Thoughts: Whether expressed through dialogue, by a first-person narrator, or a third-person narrator with some degree of omniscience, if we have direct access to a character’s thoughts, we should carefully attend to it, because this is our most direct inlet to the character’s psychology—keeping in mind that what a character thinks will generally say more about them than it will deliver truth-statements about the subject(s) of their reflection.
• What other characters say about them: The remarks characters make about each other (or anything else, for that matter) might say more about themselves than about the subject of their utterances, but nonetheless characters can give additional perspectives on each other.
• Exposition: Exposition means backstory – events that are not narrated but are mentioned as having happened before the time of the events narrated in the story. This narrative device, quite popular in fiction from the 19th century and earlier but less so since, can fill in a lot of information about the origins and evolution of a character.

The British writer E.M. Forster distinguishes between flat and round characters (or what we could also call two-dimensional vs. three-dimensional characters): those that have many layers and psychological depth vs. those defined by just one or two salient character traits. Flat characters may be stock characters: readily identifiable character types passed down in a culture, like the wise old man or the happy-go-lucky sidekick. Having flat characters in a work is not a bad thing—not every character in a work needs to be subjected to complex, drawn out characterization. It would probably be a bit absurd to develop into roundness the character of a butler whose only function in a narrative is to deliver a message, for instance. And as we noted a few chapters back, before the inception of modernity gave birth to the novel and short story as genres, effectively all fictional characters were what we would today call flat.

Another important distinction to make when thinking about characterization is that of static vs. dynamic characters. A static character stays the same throughout a narrative while a dynamic character changes. When we encounter a dynamic character, we should ask what theme(s) is being explored through this process of change –what is the text saying overall about the nature of maturation or trauma or aging and jadedness? For example, over the course of Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” Ebenezer Scrooge goes from being a cold-hearted, self-centered miser to a compassionate, giving individual – thus illustrating how reflection on our past and on the sufferings of others can increase empathy and break us out of habitual modes of being.

When we analyze characterization, we need to systematically ask not just how characters have been constructed in the text, but what themes they help to develop through their defining traits, the situations they encounter, and their modes of negotiating these situations. For instance, what is Jay Gatsby saying about the nature of ambition and what is he showing about the operational dynamic of Roaring Twenties capitalism? What is Okonkwo in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart showing about the admixture of pride and toxic masculinity and what does his downfall illustrate about the social consequences of European imperialism?

When we are asking these questions, we need to do so with a firm sense of the cultural context of the work we are approaching. The actions or other defining traits of a character may mean something different in the culture of a work’s setting than they do in our own. For instance, the rotund figure of the Wife of Bath in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales would have signified sexual allure in Chaucer’s England of the Middle Ages, while in contemporary U.S. society dominant cultural attitudes would associate that sort of figure with qualities like sloth and physical unattractiveness. A famous incident is often recounted about an anthropologist doing fieldwork in the Kalahari Desert: the tribe he was working with would tell stories around the campfire at the end of the day and asked him to do the same. Unable to think of another story, the anthropologist began recounting the plot of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. But the tribespeople couldn’t understand the basic narrative conflict, why Hamlet was so hung up on the romantic coupling between his mother and his uncle, which registered for him (and Shakespeare’s early Modern British audience) as unnatural. In the tribespeople’s society a man is expected to marry his brother’s widow so that she can be provided for, hence Hamlet’s response to this came off as insane or nonsensical to them. “Unnaturalness,” like most resounding moral judgments we might make, is pretty culturally relative.

Suggested Short Story Readings to Accompany this Chapter

My preference is to use stories with just one or two vivid characters to further develop students’ understandings of the process of characterization. I use the story “Miss Clairol” by Helena Maria Viramontes, which works particularly well, as there are two variations available online, each of which provides a slightly different articulation of character (and hence theme). Other useful textual exemplars of characterization include “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and “The Necklace” by Guy de Maupassant.