Chapter 5 - Characterization

Movies are memorable for their characters. I can imagine sitting down to dinner with Indiana Jones, Hannibal Lecter (Silence of the Lambs, the bunny boiler from Basic Instinct, and Serial Mom (Kathleen Turner). Some dinner that would be, though the meat would be in question! Or I could dine with Bette Midler, Bruce Springstein, Sonny Bono, and Cher. I wouldn’t be adequate.

I could also imagine dining with some literary characters: Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich (would he be wheeled in on his death bed and fed intravenously?), Faulkner’s Lena Grove from Light in August (would she still be pregnant, ever pregnant and wandering, and have just stumbled into our dining room?), Wharton’s Ethan Frome (forever scarred), and Kafka’s Gregor Samsa from “The Metamorphosis” (a cockroach at dinner might spoil our appetites!).

It is, frankly, simpler to imagine dining with movie stars or performers than literary characters. Literary characters take us behind the “mask” of being; they are not all show and adventure. Literary characters are like people in real life: they are complex, dynamic, and riddled with contradiction. Richard Cohen in Writer's Mind © 1995, writes that characters are created, not constructed out of disparate elements, and come alive driving the plot and theme of the work--it's not enough for the character just to go about responding "characteristically" to the situations in the book.

Cohen says the test of a great character is whether the reader still remember the character later, whether the reader could imagine extending the character beyond the story, and whether the character would be believable acting out of character, say in response to situations other than those found in the novel. What better situation to interact with others, act out of character, and have others make comments about you than at a dinner party?

Well then, let’s have a dinner party. I’ll bring in characters to the party as I read about them in the books for this chapter. And we’ll have Emma host. That’ll give her something to do since I didn’t read her book (Emma by Jane Austen). We’ll see how alive the characters are as they interact at the dinner party stepping right off the last pages of their book (unless they died…).

The books for this chapter on characterization are:

• An American Romance, by John Casey
  
• David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens
  
• Something Happened, by Joseph Heller
  
• Red and the Black, by Stendhal
  
• Middlemarch, by George Eliot
  
• What Maisie Knew, by Henry James