Characters

A fictional character is any person who appears in a work of fiction. More accurately, a fictional character is the person or conscious entity we imagine to exist within the world of such a work. more...

Home
Arts & Photography
Biographies & Memoirs
Business & Investing
Children's Books
Comics & Graphic Novels
Authors, A-Z
Cartooning
Characters
Batman
Cerebus
Daredevil
Elektra
Fantastic Four
Hellboy
Justice League
Sandman
Spawn
Spider-Man
Star Wars
Superman
X-Men
Children's Comics
Comic Strips
General
Graphic Novels
History & Price Guides
Manga
Publishers
Cooking, Food & Wine
Entertainment

In addition to people, characters can be aliens, animals, gods or, occasionally, inanimate objects. Characters are almost always at the center of fictional texts, especially novels and plays. It is, in fact, hard to imagine a novel or play without characters, though such texts have been attempted (James Joyce's Finnegans Wake is one of the most famous examples). In poetry, there is almost always some sort of person present, but often only in the form of a narrator or an imagined listener.

In various forms of theatre, performance arts and cinema (except for animation and CGI films), fictional characters are performed by actors, dancers and singers. In animations and puppetry, they are voiced by voice actors, though there have been several examples, particularly, in machinima, where characters are voiced by computer generated voices.

The process of creating and describing characters in a work of fiction is called characterization.

The opposite of a fictional character is a nonfictional character.

Names of characters

The names of fictional characters are often quite important. The conventions of naming have changed over time. In many Restoration comedies, for example, characters are given emblematic names that sound nothing like real life names: \"Sir Fidget\", \"Mr. Pinchwife\" and \"Mrs. Squeamish\" are some typical examples (all from The Country Wife by William Wycherley). Some 18th and 19th century texts, on the other hand, represent characters' names by the use of a single letter and a long dash (this convention is also used for other proper nouns, such as place names). This has the effect of suggesting that the author had a real person in mind but omitted the full name for propriety's sake. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo uses this technique. A similar technique was employed by Ian Fleming in his 20th Century James Bond novels, where the real name for M, if spoken in dialogue, was always written \"Adm. Sir M***

Some ways of reading characters

Readers vary enormously in how they understand fictional characters. The most extreme ways of reading fictional characters would be to think of them exactly as real people or to think of them as purely artistic creations that have everything to do with craft and nothing to do with real life. Most styles of reading fall somewhere in between.

Character as symbol

In some readings, certain characters are understood to represent a given quality or abstraction. Rather than simply being people, these characters stand for something larger. Many characters in Western literature have been read as Christ symbols, for example. Other characters have been read as symbolizing capitalist greed (as in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby), the futility of fulfilling the American Dream, or quixotic romanticism (Don Quixote). Three of the principle characters in Lord of the Flies can be said to symbolize elements of civilization: Ralph represents the civilizing instinct; Jack represents the savage instinct; Piggy represents the rational side of human nature.

Read more at Wikipedia.org