ABSTRACT
Character, and everything it entails in the way of deep insight into the minds of imagined others, their uniqueness of motive and difference of worldview, is often what most powerfully attracts readers to novels and stories. Yet it is the element in narratives that seems least amenable to sys tematic analysis. As a result it remains relatively neglected within narratological studies. To begin with, many narratologists were unconvinced that here was a genuine topic to explore: what is called the ontological status of character, individuals, and the self, was widely questioned (the ontological status of a thing means its status as a part of existence: in what sense does it ‘really’ exist, relative to other ‘really existing’ things?). This was prob ably part of a widespread reaction, in mid-twentieth-century literary studies, to criticism and analyses which tended to assimilate characters in literature to real people. Thus A. C. Bradley’s treatment of Shakespeare’s tragedies as if they were the case-histories of real people, which formerly had a profound influence on the study and performance of Shakespeare, was increasingly seen as partial and distorting. There was also something of a reaction against the heavy emphasis on character, the ‘bourgeois self determining Subject’, found in both nineteenth-century British novels and traditional literary criticism about them. Nouveaux romanciers such as Robbe-Grillet and Sarraute wrote their novels in a manner defiant of the cult of the individual and any over-valuing of the allegedly unique experience and response of particular personages whose psychologies were to be dramatized. On the contrary, in such experimental fiction at least, similarity of experience and personal behaviour, rather than dif ference, was asserted. And in tune with this, the structuralist preference was to treat character ‘as a myth’, as Culler succinctly put it (Culler, 1975a: 230).
