Character (arts)

In fiction, a character is a person or other being in a narrative (such as a novel, play, radio or television series, music, film, or video game).

A character, particularly when enacted by an actor in the theater or cinema, involves "the illusion of being a human person".

[7] In literature, characters guide readers through their stories, helping them to understand plots and ponder themes.

Some writers make use of archetypes as presented by Carl Jung as the basis for character traits.

By contrast, round characters are complex figures with many different characteristics, that undergo development, sometimes sufficiently to surprise the reader.

An example of a popular dynamic character in literature is Ebenezer Scrooge, the protagonist of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.

At the start of the story, he is a bitter miser, but by the end of the tale, he transforms into a kindhearted, generous man.

Unlike regular characters, the guest ones do not need to be carefully incorporated into the storyline with all its ramifications: they create a piece of drama and then disappear without consequences to the narrative structure, unlike core characters, for which any significant conflict must be traced during a considerable time, which is often seen as an unjustified waste of resources.

[26][27] In the earliest surviving work of dramatic theory, Poetics (c. 335 BCE), the Classical Greek philosopher Aristotle states that character (ethos) is one of six qualitative parts of Athenian tragedy and one of the three objects that it represents (1450a12).

[33]Aristotle suggests that works were distinguished in the first instance according to the nature of the person who created them: "the grander people represented fine actions, i.e. those of fine persons" by producing "hymns and praise-poems", while "ordinary people represented those of inferior ones" by "composing invectives" (1448b20—1449a5).

[35] In the Tractatus coislinianus (which may or may not be by Aristotle), Ancient Greek comedy is defined as involving three types of characters: the buffoon (bômolochus), the ironist (eirōn), and the imposter or boaster (alazṓn).

[37] By the time the Roman comic playwright Plautus wrote his plays two centuries later, the use of characters to define dramatic genres was well established.

The modern literary and theatrical sense of 'an individual created in a fictitious work' is not attested in OED until mC18: 'Whatever characters any... have for the jestsake personated... are now thrown off' (1749, Fielding, Tom Jones).