Narratologists, on the other hand, remind us that characters are con-
structs, even if they often seem to be like real people. They refer to characters
as actants ,or existents , neutralising the human element. Narratologists
see characters as agents in the story, as much as people in their own right:
characters make things happen and set the story in motion. Characters for
narratologists are made up of different traits. The more complex the depic-
tion and inter-relationship of these traits, the more psychological depth the
character will seem to have.
Post-structuralist and postmodern theories have transformed even
further the way we think about character (see Exercise 2). Traditional ideas
of character are implicitly based on notions of a unified self that both
postmodern theory and psychoanalytic theory tend to explode. As we have
seen, postmodern theory sees the subject not as unified, but as split or
splintered. In postmodern fictions a splintered subjectivity is everywhere
to be seen. In fact in literary studies, the concept of character has been
largely replaced by the notion of postmodern identity, which centres on
a fluid and multiple subjectivity. It plays down individuality, since we are
all caught up in social discourses of gender, ethnicity and economics. Post-
modern conceptions of subjectivity stress difference. This has been
paralleled in postmodern fictions by a more open approach to character.
Again this approach is frictional: creating a tension between realist and less
realist conceptions of character.
The reaction against the well-developed character has taken a number
of different forms, some of which will be explored in the following section.
Loosely differentiated characters
In postmodern fictions a character may be looser, less consistent and more
incomplete than a realist character. In addition, characters are not always
clearly differentiated in the narrative, since they may be transformations of
each other (see Exercise 2a). This projects, on the one hand, the plurality
of identity, and on the other, how people’s personalities, roles, back-
grounds, experiences and ways of viewing the world overlap. At a more
general level it suggests that events, ideas and identities are always many-
faceted and interconnected.
In Paul Auster’s ‘City of Glass’ (1988), for example, the central charac-
ter, Quinn, is constantly identifying with, and even being absorbed into,
other characters. He has a pen name, William Wilson, and identifies with
one of the characters in his novel, Max Work. At the beginning of the story
Quinn takes on the identity of Paul Auster, a private detective whose name
shadows that of the author. But Quinn can also be identified with Peter
Stillman Snr and Peter Stillman Jnr: the people he is working for and
140 The Writing Experiment