Practical focus

1. Study the main characters of the literary works to follow. What makes these characters life-like? Do you believe that they transcend their own flaws and weaknesses? Support your stance relying on the text. Outline the character arc in these novels.

Л.Н. Толстой Война и мир (Наташа Ростова)

М.А. Булгаков Мастер и Маргарита (Мастер)

П. Зюскинд Парфюмер. История одного убийцы (Жан-Батист Гренуй)

Дж Остин Гордость и предубеждение (Элизабет Беннет, мистер Дарси)

Ш. Бронте Джейн Эйр (мистер Рочестер)

Дж. Сэленджер Над Пропастью во Ржи (Холден Колфилд)

2. Study the characters of the book you are currently reading. Analyze the character arc featured by the author. Does the author give prominence to weaknesses, imperfections, quirks and vices of the characters to humanize them? (лишнее?)

Meta-focus

Read the paragraph about other? tools which can be employed by authors to humanize their characters

Nothing is stranger or more important in our reading of novels than the sense that we are encountering real people (мы сталкиваемся с реальными людьми в них) in them. Academic critics tend to steer away (стараться держаться подальше) from the business of characterization, even though it is invariably the ordinary measure of a novelist’s achievement. It is as it succumbing to (поддаваться) the illusionthat a ‘character’ of a book is a person implies losing your critical faculties.

“That no one has yet succeeded in constructing a complete and coherent theory of character is probably precisely because of this human aspect. The character is not a human being, it resembles one” (M. Bal, Narratology 1985).

How is this resemblance achieved?

A novel does not necessarily take us into the deepest recesses of the character’s mind. “Character”, one might say, is what people have, “consciousness” is ourselves.

Let us consider some tools which are employed (средства, использованные) by authors:

1. A first-person narration vs. a third-person narration

A first-person narration (повествование от первого лица) has singular opportunities precisely because its narrator cannot have access to the thoughts of the novel’s other characters. Reading a first-person narrative, the critical issue is not what we think of the characters, but whether we believe what the narrator tells about them. In many novels such narrators fail to flesh the other characters out (конкретизировать других героев). But then a reader is invited to infer what the narrators do not see. Such narrators can always be surprised by the characters they describe, and such surprise can be an index of their authenticity (индекс подлинности).

Even a third-person narrative (повествование от третьего лица) that seems to go deep into the thoughts of some of its characters (углубляться в мысли кого-то из героев) will probably have minor characters whom we know very little, or know only on the surface (поверхностно знакомый). Some of the most memorable or amusing characters (наиболее запоминающиеся и занимательные персонажи) in fiction are designedly (умышленно, сознательно) not like real people, in all their complexity (во всей их сложности). From the beginning a character has been a type.

Note! Such a character has often been called “Theophrastian”, after the ancient Greek author Theophrastus, who composed a collection called Characters. Those we various “kinds of men”: the flatterer, the garrulous man, the buffoon, the pretentious man, and so on. Following the publication of a Latin translation of work at the end of the 16^th century, the genre became popular in England and a series of writers produced their own collections of characters. Over 300 different editions of such collections were published in England during the 16^th century (McMullin, p. 82).

The presence of such a character is often signaled by their names.

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