Lecture 3: How Characters Are Different from People
representative moments of their lives. We all live through moments
of drama that might make for good stories, but the vast majority of
our lives is made up of an endless chain of ordinary moments. Such
moments are of no interest to anyone else and sometimes not even to us.
o When we write stories, however, we leave out all the ordinary,
boring parts. The story of Hamlet starts when he learns, from
his father’s ghost, that his father was murdered by his uncle
and his mother so that his uncle could be king. The rest of the
play is about how Hamlet deals with this information, and
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everyone he thinks has wronged him.o By contrast, a version of +DPOHW that reproduced every single
moment of his life would be both impractical and tedious.
The life of a real person goes on and on, with no scene breaks
or dramatic structure, but in a narrative, we see only the
VLJQL¿FDQWPRPHQWVo Of course, some books try to reproduce the minute-by-minute
progression of everyday life. The high-modernist novels
8O\VVHV and 0UV 'DOORZD\ both take place over a single
day—and not a particularly dramatic one—in the lives of the
main characters. But even with these seemingly all-inclusive
narratives, we see only a few hours of the characters’ lives, not
a complete record of every moment from dawn to dusk.z We know the people in our lives by what they look like, what they say,
what they do, and what other people tell us about them—that is, by
report. When we add this fourth way of knowing, we can expand our
experience of real people beyond personal relationships to include all
the real people we’ve ever heard about, from a friend of a friend to a
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o Both the people we know personally and those we know
about by report are equally real, and because of that, people
in both groups share a certain impenetrable mystery: We can’t
know what they’re thinking. We have no direct access to the
consciousness of other living people.