C h a r a c t e r6 3As one critic wryly comments, it is a magnificent coup de théâtre.
This man can even turn the act of stabbing himself into a self-
congratulatory gesture. He idealises himself even at the point
of death.
By setting Othello in the context of the play as a whole, seeing
how its mode of characterising him is interwoven with theme, plot,
mood, imagery and so on, we can come up with an idea of literary
character rather different from his own. He no longer appears such
a grandly autonomous being. This is one way to avoid speaking of
characters as though they lived in your apartment building. Hamlet
is not simply a despondent young prince; he is also an occasion for
certain reflections by the play as a whole, the embodiment of
certain ways of seeing and modes of feeling which stretch far
beyond himself. He is a complex of insights and preoccupations
rather than just a student with a shady stepfather. We also need to
examine the techniques by which character is manufactured. Is a
particular literary figure presented simply as a type or emblem, or
is she subtly psychologised? Is she grasped from the inside or
treated from other characters’ standpoints? Is she seen as coherent
or self- contradictory, static or evolving, firmly etched or fuzzy at
the edges? Are characters viewed in the round or stripped to
functions of the plot? Are they defined through their actions and
relationships, or do they loom up as disembodied conscious-
nesses? Do we feel them as vivid physical presences or essentially
verbal ones, as readily knowable or as full of elusive depths?
One of the achievements of the great European realist novel,
from Stendhal and Balzac to Tolstoy and Thomas Mann, is to illus-
trate this interweaving of character and context. Characters in this
kind of fiction are seen as caught up in a web of complex mutual
dependencies. They are formed by social and historical forces