Characterisation
Characters and More Characters
Have you ever encountered a literary character who seems so real that he or she might just jump right
off the page and into your living room? What made that character so special? Was it the details the
author included about his or her personality and actions? Was it the words you 'heard' the character
speak? In this lesson, we're going to focus on literary characters and learn about how authors bring
them to life.
Let's think about what characters are and the kinds of
characters we encounter in fiction.
Characters
are the
players in a story, the people (or animals or other non-human
creatures or objects) who act and are acted upon. They drive
the story's plot, but they also allow readers to meet and
reflect on many different types of people with many different
types of personalities and problems. As readers of novels and
watchers of films we identify with and follow the characters
throughout the narrative and are invested in them and their
stories.
Classifying Characters
We can classify characters in several ways.
Major characters vs. minor characters:
Major characters
are central to a story; they take a leading
role in the story's primary events. These characters are complex, and they develop throughout the
story.
Minor characters
, on the other hand, support the major characters throughout the story's
action, but they are not as highly developed. They can come and go or can be a mainstay but are often
less important and are less developed than major characters. In J.K. Rowling's
Harry Potter
series, for
instance, Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, and Ron Weasley are major characters while Luna
Lovegood, Neville Longbottom, and Seamus Finnigan are minor characters.
Protagonists vs. antagonists.
A
protagonist
is a story's central character who faces a major conflict
that must be solved before the story's end. The protagonist is often the character we spend the most
time with and follow throughout the story. We often wish for the protagonist to succeed in
overcoming the conflicts that oppose him or her.
This doesn’t nec
essarily make this character the
‘good guy’ it simply makes them the major character within the literary work.
An
antagonist
opposes
the protagonist and serves as an obstacle that the protagonist must overcome to resolve their conflict.
The antagonist doesn’t necessarily have to be a ‘bad guy’
and can
oppose the protagonist in many ways and for many reasons. The
antagonist can take the form of a physical obstacle, an
internal/emotional/mental obstacle, a company, an idea, a system
or person. In J.R.
R. Tolkien’s
Lord of the Rings
, Frodo Baggins is a
protagonist, while his main antagonists are, Lord Sauron, the One
Ring and his internal struggle with temptation and fear. However,
in the Japanese anime series
Death Note
Light Yagami is the mass
murdering protagonist and his antagonist L is an international
private detective trying to solve the string of murders.
