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Impersonation
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Back in 1927, the novelist E.M. Forster differentiated flat and round
characters in fiction. Flat characters, he said, could be summed up in a
single sentence. They were often one-dimensional or mechanical,
merely there for the plot or to populate the scene. Round characters, on
the other hand, possess richness and depth. The novelist establishes a
round character with a great deal of rich characterisation, with vivid
descriptions, and presents them in a series of compelling situations.
Flat characters are all those that you cannot really remember. Round
characters are those familiar names that you might have encountered
and can recall instantly: Becky Sharp, Heathcliff, Gatsby, Tom Sawyer,
Tess Durbeyfield, Macbeth, Don Juan, Yossarian, Pi Patel, perhaps?
Building on the discussion of enactors and worlds in the previous unit, we
might suppose that rich, round characters are often the result of having
several enactors of that character presented to us across a range of worlds.
So, for example, Heathcliff appears in Emily Bronts Wuthering Heights as a
boy and later as a man, as a despotic bully and as a lover, and as an enactor
through the eyes of the narrator Lockwood, the storyteller Nelly Dean, and as
portrayed within a letter, and also in a dream recounted by Cathy. By the end
of the novel, you the reader are likely to have a complex, multi-faceted
relationship with Heathcliff and we can trace at least a large part of this to
the complex world-structural presentation of the novel. It means we have met
many enactors of Heathcliff, producing one rich sense of character.
We might say, in fact, that Heathcliff has reached a threshold ofimpersonation,
in the sense that he has become so rich and psychologised as to have
attained person-ness. However, it may be that person-ness is not an
absolute black-and-white distinction as in Forsters flat/round notion. In unit
1.4, we raised the possibility that person-ness is scalable. This rests on the

cognitive linguistic principle of prototypicality: the insight that humans do not

categorise the world and everything in our lives like a filing cabinet of
definitions, but rather as a flexible and adaptable scale of good examples and
less good examples. A pencil, for example, is ordinarily a good example of a
writing implement, but a less good example of a tool for opening a tin, or a rod
for planting seeds, or a weapon, or a drumstick, and it is a really bad example
of a mode of transport, or a person. However, given some imaginative
differences in context, I am sure you can think of situations in which a pencil
can become quite a good example of those categories. It would be wrong,
then, to say that X is not an example of Y; rather X might (usually) be simply a
very bad example of Y and those judgements are not fixed.
So you probably think of both me and you as people, but in your own head,
you are a much better example of a person than I am. Your close friends and
family are much better examples of people than faceless and nameless
foreigners on the other side of the world. Your own pet dog, cat, rabbit or
goldfish is a better example of a person than the original bearer of the
anonymous steak you might eat tonight. You might feel that a favourite
television soap actor, or the marketed face of a well-loved celebrity, or your
own beloved literary character are all better, richer examples of persons than
actual groups of unknown people with whom you have merely shared a bus or
a train carriage once.
Purely in terms of your emotional and cognitive relationship with people, it
hardly matters whether those people are real or fictional. You can cry at the
loss of fictional literary and cinematic friends, or celebrity people you like but
have never met, or at the death of actual people who you know but in all
cases the tears are real tears not fictional ones, and the feelings feel the
same. Only on a higher, ethical level do you know that fundamentally there is
a difference in your own responsibility for fictional people compared with real
ones.
Determining whether a fictional character has reached a level of
impersonation is, of course, not an entirely objective matter. Impersonation is
something that you do with a text, although of course some writers are better
than others at providing you with the material for generating a fictional person.
This means that the threshold of impersonation in a novel, story, poem, drama
or movie is not a precisely defined point, but is rather fuzzier than Forsters

simple binary distinction. And so we can all have debates as to the richness in
our own minds of a particular literary character or cinematic portrayal.
Think of a literary character that achieves a level of impersonation, for you.
Go and look up the passages in text where that character is drawn. How do
they achieve person-ness? Describe it briefly in the Comments below.
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