Characterization
You get to know fictional characters by their actions, relationships, conversations, and environment. The methods an author uses in presenting characters are called characterization. The author uses various techniques to portray the human characteristics—physical appearance, personality traits, and actions—of imaginary individuals.
When you are reading a short story or a novel, pay close attention to the following means of revealing character:
- Outside narrator’s comments: The narrator may describe how a character looks, give you background information, summarize moments from the character’s past, or tell you what a character is thinking.
- Other characters’ comments: Frequently, a character narrating a story comments on the other characters. This type of narrator may have direct contact with these characters, and you see them from the narrator’s point of view. Through the narrator’s descriptions of and relationship with the other characters, you learn about both the narrator’s personality and the characters that he or she knows.
- Dialogue: Another way you can learn about characters is through what they say. Characters reveal their personalities when they communicate aloud. Dialogue is a conversation between characters. As you read, you “hear” the characters’ speech—the actual words they use to express their thoughts, feelings, and attitudes.
- Stage Directions: In a drama, the stage directions offer clues into a character’s appearance, behavior, and personality.
- Scenes depicting characters in action: Showing a character in action is another method of characterization. You judge characters by what they do. Is a character drawn to threatening or safe situations? What are the character’s motives for his involvement in the story’s events? Selfishness? Adventure? Concern for others? You discover the answers to these questions by observing the character’s behavior.
Example
A character commenting on another character is the method of characterization used in the following passage. A mother, the narrator of the story, recalls the hardships of raising her daughter alone during the 1930s and 1940s.
I will never total it all. I will never come in to say: She was a child seldom smiled at. Her father left me before she was a year old. I had to work her first six years when there was work, or I sent her home and to his relatives. There were years she had care she hated. She was dark and thin and foreign-looking in a world where the prestige went to blondeness and curly hair and dimples, she was slow where glibness was prized. She was a child of anxious, not proud, love. We were poor and could not afford for her the soil of easy growth. I was a young mother, I was a distracted mother.
From “I Standing Here Ironing,” by Tillie Olsen
From the mother’s point of view, you catch a glimpse of the daughter’s physical appearance—“dark and thin and foreign-looking.” The mother also tells you about the conditions affecting her daughter’s upbringing:
- Her father abandoned her before she was a year old.
- She was frequently separated from her mother.
- She had a deprived childhood.
See pages 179–193 and 263–266 in Contemporary's GED Language Arts, Reading for more information on characterization.