How Characters Are Different from People ......................................

Lecture 3

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ne of the curious facts about the emotional life of human beings
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lives have never existed at all. Odysseus, King Arthur, Jane Eyre,
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part of the common cultural currency of humankind; further, they are the
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difference between character-driven stories and plot-driven stories, but the
fact is that every narrative begins with its characters. In this lecture, we’ll
explore the fundamental differences between the imaginary characters of
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Characters in Fiction and Life
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characters and real people is that characters are simpler.
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words by a single writer, whereas a real person, even an
uncomplicated one, is the product of millennia of heredity,
centuries of culture, and a lifetime of experience. The best a
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one. They have only the illusion of complexity.

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so vivid, because we can, by the end of a book or a play, see

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real people, even the ones we know intimately. But again, this

wholeness is an illusion. In +DPOHW, for example, we see only

a few days in Hamlet’s life, and even in larger-scale works, we

never see as much of a character as we could a real person.

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that characters are made up of only the most dramatic or the most