How the author conveys character

 

Another important aspect of character analysis is determining how the author presents and establishes a character. There are two basic methods for conveying character: telling and showing.

 

Telling

Telling involves direct intervention and commentary by the author. He interrupts the narrative to comment on the character's personality, thoughts or actions. The guiding hand of the author is clearly evident as he helps us to form opinions about the character. An example of the telling technique can be found in this short extract from D.H. Lawrence's novel, in which the author describes the protagonist of his novel:

 Arthur Morel was growing up. He was a quick, careless, impulsive boy, a good deal like his father. He hated study, made a great moan if he had to work, and escaped as soon as possible to his sport again.

 

Showing

When an author uses the technique of showing, he steps aside and allows the characters to reveal themselves through what they do and say. His voice is silent. The reader is asked to infer character from the evidence provided in the dialogue and action of the story. When the author chooses the showing method, the revelation of character is generally gradual. The reader must be attentive and receptive, and use his intelligence and memory to draw conclusions about the character's identity.

Modern authors tend to favour showing over telling, but most writers use a mixture of both methods.

 

Dialogue

In real life what people say reveals a lot about who they are and what they think. Similarly, in fiction, what a character says can help us to understand basic elements of his personality. The character's attitude towards others may also emerge from the dialogue. Important information about his origin, education, occupation or social class may also be revealed by what he says and how he says it. However, characters in stories do not always say what they really think. Just like people in real life, they can be deceptive and create a false image of themselves.

 

Action

We can learn a lot about a character's emotions, attitudes and values by examining what he does in the course of the story. We should try to understand the motives for the character's actions, and discover the underlying forces that make him behave the way he does.

 

Comparison with other characters Is the way a character behaves similar to or different from the way other characters act? One of the chief functions of minor characters in fiction is to provide contrast to the main character. What can you learn by comparing the protagonist to some of the other less important characters?

 

Setting

The time and place in which the story unfolds may provide useful information about the characters. If events take place during a particular historical period (the Middle Ages, the French Revolution, the Vietnam War) the characters' ideas and actions may be shaped by important external events. The characters' physical surrounding (where they grew up, where they choose to live) may help us to understand their psychological make-up.

References to the social setting may also give us some helpful insight. Do the characters share or reject the values associated with their social background?

 

Names

Occasionally the character's name may provide clues to his personality. Emily Bronte's choice of Heathcliff as a name for the hero of her novel Wuthering Heights conveys the character's wild, rugged, almost primitive nature. (Heath = wild, uncultivated land; cliff = high rocky land that usually faces the sea)

 

Appearance

In real life it is not advisable to judge a person by his appearance, but in fiction how a character looks often provides important information about his personality. References to the clothes a character wears may, for example, indicate his social and economic status. Details of a character's physical appearance may prove useful in determining his age and the general state of his physical and emotional health.

Imagery

Images are words or phrases that appeal to our senses. Consider these lines taken from Wilfred Owen's poem:

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags we cursed though sludge.

The poet is describing his experience as a soldier during the First World War. Through his choic of words he creates:

• visual images: bent double, old beggars under sacks, knock-kneed;

• aural images: coughing like hags, cursed;

• a tactile image: sludge. If we replace the imagistic words that Owen uses

with more generic terms:

Physically exhausted, the soldiers marched across the wet terrain cursing their fate.

 the impact on our senses is lost

A writer may use an image to help us:

• re-live a sense experience that we have already had. We may be able to conjure up the sound of old women coughing or the sensation of walking through mud from past experience;

• have a aew sense experience. This is achieved when our sense memories are called forth in a pattern that does not correspond to any of our actual experiences. Exploited in this way, images allow us to see, hear, feel, smell and taste experiences that are new to us.

We use the term imagery to refer to combinations or clusters of images that are used to create a dominant impression. Death, corruption and disease imagery, for example, creates a powerful network in Shakespeare's tragedy Hamlet. Writers often develop meaningful patterns in their imagery, and a writer's choice and arrangement of images is often an important clue to the overall meaning of his work.