Literary Appreciation Character PDF

Literary Appreciation Character Second year students Instructor: Muna Ghanayem  A Character: an imagined person who inhabits a story. However, not all characters are people, some are animals, others are natural forces. Give an example. Usually we recognize, in the main chara...

Literary Appreciation Character Second year students Instructor: Muna Ghanayem  A Character: an imagined person who inhabits a story. However, not all characters are people, some are animals, others are natural forces. Give an example. Usually we recognize, in the main characters of a story, human personalities that become familiar to us. Most writers of literary stories create characters who strike us as unique individuals. What human personalities do you find familiar in “Godfather Death”? If the story seems “true to life”, we find that its characters act in a reasonably consistent manner, and that the author has provided them with Motivation: a good enough reason to behave as they do. A character might behave in a sudden and unexpected way and deny what we have been told about his nature or personality, we trust that he had a reason and that sooner or later we will discover it.  Stock characters: characters with outstanding traits; like the mad scientist of horror movies or the prince charming of fairy tales. Stock characters are suitable for writers of commercial fiction: they require little detailed description. Stock characters have single dominant virtues and vices, they tend to have many facets like people we meet  Not all authors insist that their characters behave with absolute consistency, for some contemporary stories feature characters who sometimes act without apparent reason. Nor can we say that, in good fiction, characters never change or develop. Explain the reason behind the man’s changing his claim of seeing a unicorn in the garden? In “A Christmas Carol” Charles Dickens tells how Ebenezer Scrooge, a tightfisted miser, reforms over night, suddenly gives to the poor, and seeks to help his clerk’s struggling family. But Dickens amply demonstrate why Scrooge had such a change of heart: for ghostly visitors stirring kind memories the old miser have forgotten and also warning him of the probable consequences of his habits, provide the character with enough motivation. Characters may seem Flat or Round, depending on whether a writer sketches or sculpture them.  A Flat character has only one outstanding trait or feature, or at most a few distinguishing marks: for example, the familiar stock character of the mad scientist, with his lust for absolute power and his crazily gleaming eyes. Flat characters, however, need not be stock characters. Some writers, notably Balzac, who peopled his many novels with hosts of characters, try to distinguish the flat one by giving each a single odd physical feature or behavior – a nervous twitch, a piercing gaze, an obsessive fondness for oysters. Who are the flat characters in “A Unicorn in the Garden”? What are their distinguishing marks?  Round characters, however, present us with more sides and faces – that is, their authors portray them in greater depth and in more generous details. Such a Round character may appear to us only as he appears to the other characters in the story. If their views of his differ, we will see him from more than one side. In other stories, we enter a character’s mind and come to know him through his own thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. By the time we finish reading chapter 2 of “Miss Brill”, we are all acquainted with the central character and find her amply three – dimensional. Flat Characters tend to stay the same throughout a story, but Round characters often change - learn or become enlightened, grow or deteriorate. Flat characters are not less important character. In some fiction – even the greatest – minor characters tend to be flat instead of round. Why? Rounding them would cost time and space; and so enlarge them might only distract us from the main characters.  Some critics call a fixed character Static; a changing one, Dynamic. A character, first of all, is the noise of his name. names, chosen artfully, can indicate nature. Allusion is a reference to some famous person, place, or thing in history, in other fiction, or in actuality. Whether or not it includes an allusion, a good name often reveals the character of the character. Charles dickens, a vigorous and richly suggestive christener, named a charming confidence man Mr. Jingle ( suggesting something jingly, light, and superficially pleasant ), named a couple of shyster lawyers Dodgson and Fogg ( suggesting dodging evasiveness and the confusing fog ), and named two heartless educators, who grimly drill their schoolchildren in “Hard Times," Gradgind and M'Choakumchild. M’Choakumchild is the name of a schoolteacher assigned to instruct Sissy Jupe in the fact-based education that Gradgrind supports. His name sounds like his role as a teacher: he is Mr. Choke-  Henry James, who so loved names that he kept lists of them for characters he might someday conceive, chose for a sensitive, cultured gentleman the name of Lambert Strether. Also, he chose for a down-to-earth benevolent individual, the name of Mrs. Bread, and the fragile, considerate heroine of The Spoils of Poynton the harsh sounding name of Fleda Vetch.) Lambert: a bright land Fleda: swift – fast Vetch: strength and resilience Instead of a hero, there is an antihero: an ordinary, un glorious twentieth-century citizen, usually drawn as someone "groping, puzzled, mocking, frustrated, and isolated." (Obviously, there are anti-heroine, too.)  Antiheroes are the opposite of heroes, who are decisive leaders of their people, embodying their people's highest ideals, antiheroes tend to be lonely, without perfections, just barely able to survive. Antiheroes lack "character," which means a person's conduct or "persistence and consistency in seeking to realize his long-term aims." Evidently, not only styles in heroes but also attitudes toward human nature have changed. In the eighteenth century, Scottish philosopher David Hume argued that the nature of an individual is relatively fixed and unalterable. Hume mentioned, however, a few exceptions: for example: "A person who is gentle and kind most of the time gives a peevish answer; but he has the toothache or is hungry. For a long time after Hume, novelists and short-story writers seem to have assumed that characters behave nearly always in a predictable fashion and that their actions ought to be consistent with their personalities. Now and again, a writer differed: Jane Austen in Pride and Prejudice has her protagonist Elizabeth Bennet remark to the citified Mr. Darcy, who fears that life in the country cannot be amusing, "But people themselves alter so much, that there is something to be observed in them forever."  Many contemporary writers of fiction would deny even that people have definite selves to alter. Following Sigmund Freud and other modern psychologists, they assume that a large part of human behavior is shaped in the unconscious- that, for instance, a person might fear horses, not because of a basically funky nature, but because of unconscious memories of having been nearly trampled by a horse when a child. In your opinion, do personalities change? What factors lead to that change? Hume claims that a "personality" is more vulnerable to change from such causes as age, disease, neurosis, psychic shock, or brainwashing than was once believed. D. H. Lawrence demonstrated his view of individuals as bits of one vast Life Force, spurred to act by incomprehensible passions and urges —the "dark gods" in them.