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Unlike a person in real life, a literary characters personal qualities and actions are limited by his or her function in the story, whether the character seems designed to fit the plot or the plot is derived from the character. haracteri!ation is the method by which an author creates the appearance and personality of imaginary persons and reveals their character. haracteri!ation is the ability to bring the people of his or her imagination to life for the reader. (NTCs Dictionary of Literary Terms) "herefore, when one reflects upon characters and characteri!ation one considers imaginary or fictional people that e#ist to the reader as real persons and that move about in a credible convincing imaginary world. $n most literary works characters are generally sub%ected to their own dispositions, mental tensions and an#ieties since the ma%ority of the novelists put forward the idea that personality does not change very often, and thus it can be determinable and responsible for any action. &n this supposition most novelists deal with the problems and conflicts of their fictional people under a logical parameter. '. (. )orster sees human beings under a different perspective. )or him human beings have little control over themselves, since they are easily influenced by both internal and e#ternal factors beyond their scope, and they are easily reached and vulnerable. As a result, they fail to connect with each other and are unable to elucidate their feelings and emotions. *ife tests them with challenges and hauls their personalities in such a way that they cannot find logical e#planations to their reactions. )orster conveys his characters with all these true to life characteristics but also with illusory fictional features. +is fictional people lack logic %ust as their human beings counterparts in real life do and they are neither typical literary honourable heroes nor virtuous heroines. (ost of the time )orster utili!es an omniscient narrator and shares with his audience the inner thoughts, the self,communing of his characters but at times he conceals the thoughts and feelings of a certain character for what he wants to suggest, to voice, to create suspense, or to allow the reader to reflect
on the storyline and connect previous notions and ideas. (any times he presents an incident or an event in the last sentence of a chapter and comments or narrates how things happened or how characters react on certain specific occasions soon after in the novel. $n his works '. (. )orster presents his imaginary people in a variety of ways- through their actions, feelings and thoughts, through his e#plicit comments, through blurred insinuations concerning their behaviour and motives, through the impact of their actions and emotions and through the readers ability to infer and construe their individual features. )orster also trusts on the readers ability to remember incidents and actions, on his.her aptitude to relate events and attitudes and on his.her capacity to deduce the characters intentions and motives. "he intricate comple#ities of his characters enrich the readers intellect and give an insight into the particulars of their behaviours. $n Aspects of the Novel, a book published after a series of lectures '. (. )orster gave at the University of ambridge, he e#plains that the novelist reveals more about the characters than what we know about people in real life. )or e#ample, his female characters reveal the problems of women in society, their struggle to heighten their differences and the search for their individuality. )oster departs from the conventional se#ually peculiarly divided society of his time and portrays the love for distinctiveness that characteri!ed the /loomsbury group to which he and 0irginia 1oolf belonged, among others. "he members of this gathering believed that each human being possesses a full range of potential that must be wholly developed and freely e#pressed, that both men and women should strive to be human and to set up personal relations and that, in addition to all that, one should value the individual attempt to lead a good moral life. According to 2eter /urra '. (. )orster 3.is interested passionately in human beings4 not only in the idea of them , which is presumably what most novelists mean when they lay claim to that passion 5 but in their actual living selves. +is observation is close, his power to describe so e#act, that although we can see into their secrete lives 5 which, as he says, it is the novelists unique privilege to discover 5 his characters are so elusive, as incompletely reali!ed, as our own living friends. +e describes with e#traordinary insight personal e#perience in relation to social4 the social
setting is for him a item which cannot be omitted in the analysis of a whole man. +ence the novel of social comedy,3 3 A proper mi#ture of characters he tells us, is one of the most important ingredients of the novel. As a vehicle for conveying ideas everything depends on that. $t is the nature of the mi#ture that distinguishes (r. )orsters work4 which is built invariably round the 5 generally violent 5 clash of opposites. 6 asebook7 6897
$n his chapter on People in Aspects of the Novel )orster states a clear difference between historians and novelists. )or him, the historian records whereas the novelist must create 6page :97. +e also states the distinction between real people and people in books. +e says that in real life complete understanding of people never occurs, since we know each other appro#imately, but according to him characters can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist wishes4 their inner as well as their outer life can be e#posed. )urthermore, he believes that human beings cannot understand themselves, but that it is possible, for both writer and reader, to appreciate fictional human beings perfectly well. ;oes '. (. )orster wish his characters to be understood< '. (. )orster classifies characters into two types flat and round. )or him, flat characters are created round a single idea or quality or on a two dimensional scale. 6=:7. >ound characters are comple# three,dimensional fictional people, capable of rotundity and highly organi!ed. $n order to prove that a character is round one has to conclude if it is capable of surprising in a convincing way, of developing and changing as the novel progresses and if it is presented to us with all the contradictions, conflicts, vacillations and doubts e#perienced in life.