Novel Characters: A Genealogy
Maria DiBattista
Language: English
Pages: 208
ISBN: 1405159510
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Novel Characters offers a fascinating and in-depth history of the novelistic character from the “birth of the novel” in Don Quixote, through the great canonical works of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to the most influential international novels of the present day
- An original study which offers a unique approach to thinking about and discussing character
- Makes extensive reference to both traditional and more recent and specialized academic studies of the novel
- Provides a critical vocabulary for understanding how the novelistic conception of character has changed over time.
- Examines a broad range of novels, cultures, and periods
- Promotes discussion of how different cultures and times think about human identity, and how the concept of what a character is has changed over time
earth and impose their wills. In this fallen but curiously advanced state of human development, who you are is determined and expressed by what you possess, not just material possessions, of course, but also the moral goods – or deficiencies – that must enter into how we account for ourselves. This essentially novelistic conception of the Self derives from, but is not to be confused with the novelistic Individual, the freestanding subject of the first person singular. “I” is the habitual usage of
of its own, a mythology and later a history; thus was loyalty to a particular ecology and morality secured. One never quite knew how all the other tribes came to be, but since they did exist, they were at least useful as a screen of projection for the negative identities which were the necessary, if most uncomfortable counterpart of the positive ones.29 It is primarily as a pseudospecies, with all its defensive and bellicose impulses, that Identity attracts novelistic scrutiny. Erikson himself
wishes, intuitions, and perceptions, but once created and released back into the world, they may end up anywhere. Novelistic characters in particular are notorious for defying as much as fulfilling our expectations and hopes for them. We need to acknowledge and accept this fact about them – that they would not be novelistic characters if they did not possess and exercise their capacity to surprise – including the capacity to surprise themselves. This capacity for surprise is a measure of their
life are overlaid by the overwhelming concerns and different ideas, values, and aspirations of the next new man. “In this way,” Naipaul concludes, “leaving aside the primary notion of cruelty, the idea of a wiped-out, complete past below one’s feet quickly became almost metaphysical. The world appeared to lose some of its substance; reality became fluid. It was more natural to let go, to let the mind spring back to an everyday” (AWW, p.215). For those who inherit the emptiness rather than the
and complete than that offered by flat characters who, like Theophrastus’s characters, never vary or stray from themselves. At the same time, they seem to offer a new understanding of human nature, less systematic, but more concrete and more attuned to the hard-to-reach or seldom-seen inner life of character. This is the new kind of knowledge that the novel was invented to procure and make available for human use. Novelists experimented with the devices of first and third person, unreliable and