Lecture 3: How Characters Are Different from People
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more complex than such a character as Virginia Woolf’s Mrs.
Dalloway, if you were asked at any given moment what your
brother might be thinking, you could only guess. But you
can know with absolute certainty what Clarissa Dalloway is
thinking at any given point in the novel.o 7KLVSDUDGR[LVDWWKHFRUHRIWKHSRZHURI¿FWLRQWRWKULOO
and move us. In reading a book, all we really get are the
imaginary thoughts of an imaginary person, but we feel as if
we get something real and immediate, something we would
never otherwise see: namely, the world through someone
else’s eyes, unmediated.o 7KH LQWLPDF\ ZH VKDUH ZLWK ¿FWLRQDO FKDUDFWHUV LV RQO\ DQ
illusion of intimacy, but it’s such a powerful illusion that, at its
best and most sublime, the book in our hands disappears, the
voice of the author disappears, the world around us disappears,
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with the character.z 7KHWKLUGTXDOL¿FDWLRQLVWKLV (YHQWKRXJKDOOZULWHUVFRXOGSXWXV
in the heads of their characters, not all of them do. The amount of
access a writer allows us to have to the mind of a character varies on a
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falls somewhere in the middle, where most of what we learn about a
character is through action and dialogue, with occasional access to his
or her thoughts.The Continuum of Intimacy
z Let’s look at three examples of different points on the continuum of
intimacy, beginning with 0UV 'DOORZD\ on the most intimate end.
This novel gives us one day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, an upper-
middle-class woman living in London in the years right after the end of
World War I.