Character is a person, being, or entity in a narrative whose actions, speech, thoughts, and relationships carry the story’s meaning. Characterization is the set of techniques a writer uses to make a character knowable to the reader.
E.M. Forster distinguished between flat and round characters. Flat characters embody a single quality or idea and can be summarized in a sentence — they are not lesser for this, but they serve a different function than round characters, who surprise convincingly, whose behavior is complex enough that the reader can’t fully predict them [@forster1927]. The distinction is functional, not evaluative: a story needs both.
Characters are revealed through what they do (action), what they say (dialogue), what they think (interiority), what others say about them, and what the narrator tells the reader directly. The balance among these methods is a point of view decision. A first-person narrator has direct access to their own thoughts but must infer others’; a third-person omniscient narrator can move between minds.
Wayne Booth argued that characterization is always rhetorical — the writer’s choices about what to reveal and withhold shape the reader’s sympathies and judgments, whether or not the writer intends them to [@booth1961]. A character described with detailed interiority invites empathy; a character seen only from outside can feel opaque or threatening. These effects are craft decisions.
Related terms
- dialogue — the primary tool for revealing character through speech
- narrator — the voice through which character is filtered
- point of view — determines what access the reader has to character interiority
- conflict — character is revealed and changed through conflict
- scene — the unit of narrative where character is shown in action