Character (arts)

• 1. Introduction

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  A character, as English speakers first used the word in the modern sense, entered the language during the Restoration period, but it was Henry Fielding's novel Tom Jones in 1749 that gave the term its wide currency. The word itself descends from the Ancient Greek χαρακτήρ, a mark or imprint. From that modest origin, it grew into one of the most contested ideas in all of art and criticism.

  What is a character, exactly? Not just a name on a page. When an actor steps onto a stage or in front of a camera, something strange happens: a real person produces, as Aristotle's heirs would put it, "the illusion of being a human person". Before that theatrical vocabulary existed, the Latin phrase dramatis personae did the work, meaning literally "masks of the drama", grounding character in the physical object an actor wore over their face.

  The questions this documentary will follow are deceptively simple. How do writers actually build a character from scratch? What makes one feel alive and another feel hollow? And why did the philosopher Aristotle, in the oldest surviving work of dramatic theory, insist that character actually matters less than plot? His answer, written around 335 BCE, has been argued over ever since.

• 2. Building from Life

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  George Orwell's Animal Farm offers one of the clearest examples of characters drawn directly from real people. The pigs in that allegory were designed to be recognizable as Soviet revolutionaries, their individual traits amplified to serve the story's political argument. That technique, using a famous person identifiable with certain qualities as the seed for a principal character, is a defining feature of allegorical writing.

  Historical fiction takes a different approach. The Paris Wife, for instance, builds a fictional story around the actual life of Ernest Hemingway, anchoring invented scenes to a figure readers can look up. Authors working this way are essentially borrowing credibility, trusting that the real person's known traits will carry weight the fiction alone might not supply.

  Some writers draw on themselves. The terms author-surrogate and self-insertion both describe a character who functions as a stand-in for the person writing the book. The source of the character might also be someone the author knows personally, a historical figure they have never met, or a current public figure equally beyond their reach. What all these sources share is that the author takes an existing person, real or imagined, and pushes certain traits outward until they become the engine of a new fictional creation.

• 3. The Craft of Naming

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  Shakespeare named one of his emotional young male characters Mercutio, and the choice was not accidental. A name that encodes the psychological makeup of its bearer, makes an allegorical allusion, or hints at physical appearance is called a charactonym, and writers have been deploying them across centuries and cultures.

  John Steinbeck gave his kind, sweet character in Of Mice and Men the name Candy. Mervyn Peake's villain in Gormenghast is called Steerpike, a name that carries overtones of manipulation and menace to match his Machiavellian personality. François Rabelais named a giant Gargantua, making the character's scale legible from the first syllable. In the 1940 film Pinocchio, the enormous whale is named Monstro, its threat announced before a single scene.

  Shakespeare's method with stock characters goes further than naming. He took the boastful soldier, a type with roots stretching back to Roman comedy, and used it as the starting point for John Falstaff, one of the richest figures in the English canon. The stock type became a scaffold; the finished character bore almost no resemblance to the generic original.

• 4. Flat, Round, and In Between

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  E. M. Forster laid out the most durable taxonomy of character types in his book Aspects of the Novel. He called them flat and round. Flat characters are two-dimensional, relatively uncomplicated; round characters are complex figures with many different characteristics who can surprise the reader by changing.

  In psychological terms, round characters can be mapped onto what is known as the Big Five model of personality. The five dimensions are extraversion, agreeableness, openness to experience, conscientiousness, and neuroticism. A character who scores across multiple dimensions, who is both conscientious and neurotic, both agreeable and closed to new experience, resists easy summary. That resistance is roughly what Forster meant by "round".

  At the far end of flatness sit Mary Sues, a term from fan fiction for characters virtually devoid of flaws. The literary critic Seymour Chatman coined a different category, the "walk-on": a figure so minimally defined that they function less as a person than as part of the background. Dynamic characters, by contrast, change across the arc of a story. Ebenezer Scrooge, the protagonist of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, begins as a bitter miser and finishes as a kindhearted, generous man, making him one of the most frequently cited examples of a dynamic character in literature.

• 5. Aristotle's Challenge

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  Around 335 BCE, Aristotle wrote the Poetics, the earliest surviving work of dramatic theory, and in it he made a claim that still provokes argument: character, which he called ethos, matters less than plot, which he called mythos. His reasoning was precise. "Tragedy is a representation not of human beings but of action and life," he wrote. Happiness and unhappiness, he argued, lie in what people do, not in what kind of people they are.

  Aristotle's definition of character was also narrower than the modern one. He understood character not as a fictional person but as the quality of a person's decision-making as revealed through action. A speech in which a speaker "decides or avoids nothing at all", he wrote, does not qualify as character at all (1450b9-11). On these terms, a story could theoretically contain no characters in his sense of the word.

  He also argued that the kind of person a work represents shapes its genre. Works representing serious people belong to tragedy and epic poetry; works representing inferior people belong to comedy. The Tractatus coislinianus, a text that may or may not be by Aristotle, goes further and names three specific character types in Ancient Greek comedy: the buffoon (bômolochus), the ironist (eirōn), and the imposter or boaster (alazōn). By the time the Roman comic playwright Plautus was writing, two centuries after Aristotle, the link between character type and dramatic genre was firm enough to joke about. His Amphitryon opens with Mercury announcing that because the play contains kings and gods, it cannot be a comedy and must be a tragicomedy.

• 6. Characters in Television

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  Television introduced its own vocabulary for character. A regular, main, or ongoing character is one who appears in all or most episodes, or in a significant run of them. A recurring character appears frequently but not continuously, often driving the plot of more than one episode without anchoring the entire series. Guest or minor characters appear in only a few episodes or scenes and, unlike core characters, can exit without leaving a structural debt in the narrative.

  The distinction matters because a significant conflict involving a core character must, as the logic of serial drama demands, be traced across a considerable stretch of time. Giving that weight to a guest character is seen as a waste of resources. The guest exists to create a piece of drama and then disappear.

  Occasionally a guest or minor character attracts more audience attention than anyone planned for. When that happens and the character is promoted to a regular role, the industry term for the process is a breakout character. The phrase captures something genuine about how television characters evolve: not always by design, but by the accumulated pull of audience response over time. Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, first performed in 1891, and Strindberg's Miss Julie, written in 1888, show an earlier version of the same logic, where a character's position in the social order of class and gender does not merely reflect the drama but generates it.